Descartes on Causation

Descartes on Causation

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Descartes on Causation TAD M. SCHMALTZ

1 2008

1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schmaltz, Tad M., 1960– Descartes on causation / Tad M. Schmaltz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-532794-6 1. Descartes, René, 1596-1650. 2. Causation. I. Title. B1878.C3S26 2007 122.092–dc22 2007002235

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Je ne puis pardonner à Descartes: il voudrait bien, dans toute la philosophie, se pouvoir passer de Dieu; mais il n’a pu s’empêcher de lui donner une chiquenaude pour mettre le monde en mouvement; après cela, il n’a plus que faire de Dieu. I cannot forgive Descartes: in his whole philosophy he would like to do without God; but he could not refrain from giving him a flick to set the world in motion; after that, he had no more use for God. —Propos attribués à Pascal

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Acknowledgments

Work on this book was made possible by a research grant from the Arts and Sciences Committee on Faculty Research at Duke University. I presented some of the material in the book as a faculty member of the 2004 NEH Summer Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and also as speaker for colloquia or conferences at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, Harvard University, Simon Frasier University, the University of Oxford, the University of Sydney, the University of Washington, the University of Western Ontario, and Washington University in St. Louis. I am grateful to the editors of Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy for permission to reprint material in chapter 2 that appeared in an earlier version in that journal, vol. 3 (2006). It is a pleasure to acknowledge the assistance, both professional and personal, of colleagues, friends, and family. Special thanks to my Newtonian/Kantian friends Andrew Janiak and Eric Watkins (both experts on the issue of causation in modern philosophy) for reading and commenting insightfully on the entire penultimate version of the manuscript. I also received helpful comments on various chapters or related material from more colleagues than I can remember. With apologies to those I have forgotten, I would like to thank Roger Ariew, Ric Arthur, Andrew Chignell, Ken Clatterbaugh, Michael Della Rocca, Dennis Des Chene, Karen Detlefsen, Alan Gabbey, Dan Garber, Geoff Gorham, Sean Greenberg, Dan Kaufman, Sukjae Lee, Tom Lennon, Peter Machamer, Ted McGuire, Steve Nadler, John Nicholas, Eileen O’Neill, Andy Pessin, Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, Michael Rosenthal, Marleen Rozemond, Don Rutherford, Lisa Shapiro, Alison Simmons, James South, and the referees for the press. Thanks also to my editor, Peter Ohlin, who expertly shepherded the manuscript through to publication. On a more personal note, I owe a great debt to my wife, Louise, and to my children, Johanna and Sam, for providing the love and encouragement that have sustained me through thick and thin. Finally,

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of the late Margaret Wilson, who not only influenced but also supported my work on Descartes, as she has the work in early modern philosophy of so many other scholars of my generation. T.M.S. Durham, North Carolina November 2006

Contents

1

2

3

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

3

The Scholastic Context

9

1.1. Medieval Rejections of Occasionalism

12

1.2. Suárez on Efficient Causes and Concursus

24

1.3. From Suárez to Descartes

44

Two Causal Axioms 2.1. The Containment Axiom

51

2.2. The Conservation Axiom

71

2.3. From Axioms to Causation

84

Causation in Physics 3.1. God as Universal and Primary Cause

4

49

87 89

3.2. Laws as Particular and Secondary Causes

105

3.3. Descartes’s Conservationist Physics

125

Causation in Psychology

129

4.1. Mind–Body Interaction and Union

131

4.2. Body-to-Mind Action

145

x

CONTENTS

4.3. Mind-to-Body Action 5

Causation and Freedom

163 178

5.1. Jesuit Freedom and Created Truth

180

5.2. Indifference and Human Freedom

192

5.3. Human Freedom and Divine Providence

208

Conclusion

217

Works Cited

221

Index

231

Abbreviations

In the notes and text, I use the following abbreviations, keyed to the texts in Works Cited.

DESCARTES AT

Descartes 1964–74 (ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery), cited by volume:page; abridged English translations of RM, W, DM, PP, and PS are in Descartes 1984–85, vol. 1, English translations of the Meditations and the accompanying Objections and Replies in Descartes 1984–85, vol. 2, and abridged English translations of Descartes’s correspondence in Descartes 1991. Translations in these texts are keyed to pagination in AT.

DM

Discourse on the Method/Discours de la Methode, cited by part; in AT 6.

PP

Principles of Philosophy/Principia Philosophiae, cited by part.article; original Latin edition in AT 8-1, French edition in AT 9-2.

PS

Passions of the Soul/Passions de l’ame, cited by part.article; in AT 11.

RM

Rules for the Direction of the Mind/Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii, cited by rule; in AT 10.

W

The World/Le Monde, cited by chapter; in AT 11.

xi

xii

ABBREVIATIONS

SCHOLASTIC CONTEXT DA

Suárez, De Anima, cited by book.chapter, and paragraph; in Opera 3.

MD

Suárez 1967 (Metaphysical Disputations/Disputationes Metaphysicae), cited by disputation.section, paragraph, and volume:page; thus, XVII.1, ¶6, 1:582 = seventeenth disputation, first section, sixth paragraph, in the first volume, page 582. There is an English translation of disputation VII in Suárez 1947, of disputations XVII–XIX in Suárez 1994, and of disputations XX–XXII in Suárez 2002.

Opera

Suárez 1866 (Opera Omnia), cited by volume:page.

QPG

Thomas Aquinas, Questions on the Power of God/Quaestiones de Potentia Dei, cited by question.article; in TA 13, with an English translation in Thomas Aquinas 1952.

QT

Thomas Aquinas, Questions on Truth/Quaestiones de Veritate, cited by article.section; in TA 14, with an English translation in Thomas Aquinas 1987.

S

Durandus 1964 (On the Theological Sentences/In Sententias Theologicas), cited by book.distinction.question, and paragraph, and volume:page; thus, II.1.5, ¶11, 1:131 = second book, first distinction, fifth question, first article, eleventh paragraph, in the first volume, page 131. Online English translation of S II.1.5 in Durandus (n.d.).

ST

Thomas Aquinas 1964–81 (Summa Theologiæ), cited by part.question. article, and response (ad); thus, I.104.1, ad 4 = first part, question 104, first article, response to the third objection. This edition includes the Latin with facing English translation.

TA

Thomas Aquinas 1871–80, cited by volume:page.

Citations marked with an asterisk (*) do not have publicly available English translations. Although I have consulted the translations cited above, all translations of passages from the primary texts above are my own unless indicated otherwise.

Descartes on Causation

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Introduction

Margaret Wilson has observed that the issue of causation in the early modern period “presents the interpreter with a peculiar problem,” since on the one hand, “the notion of causality is central to the period’s major positions and disputes in metaphysics and epistemology,” whereas on the other hand “few of the most prominent figures of the period enter into detailed or precise accounts of the relation of causal dependence or causal connection” (Wilson 1999e, 141).1 Though Wilson uses this observation to frame a discussion of Spinoza, Descartes would seem to provide a case in point as well. In his argument for the existence of God in the Third Meditation, for instance, Descartes relies heavily on claims concerning causation for which he provides relatively little explication or defense. Most notably, there is his appeal in that text to the axiom that an efficient cause contains “formally or eminently” all of the “reality” that it produces in its effect. There is also Descartes’s notorious claim in a letter to Princess Elisabeth that we derive from the senses a “primitive notion” of the union of our mind with a body that involves a conception of the “forces” of the united elements to interact. It is largely left to the interpreter to determine the precise status of this notion and the precise nature of the forces involved in the union.

1. For some recent survey accounts of causation and causal explanation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Yakira 1994 and Clatterbaugh 1999. For a more substantive treatment of such accounts, see Carraud 2002. Carraud’s discussion of the issue of causation in Suárez and Descartes in particular has influenced the discussion in the present study. Whereas Carraud focuses on the connections of causation to the principle of sufficient reason (as reflected in his title, Causa sive ratio), however, I am more concerned here with the nature of causal connection or dependence.

3

4

DESCARTES ON CAUSATION

Even so, we can at least start to understand Descartes’s theory of causation in terms of its relation to an older account of causality deriving from the work of Aristotle. In the second book of his Physics, Aristotle lays out four different kinds of “cause” (aition): material, formal, efficient, and final. The material cause is that out of which something comes to be, such as the bronze of a statue, the formal cause the form of that which comes to be, such as the shape of the statue, the efficient cause the primary source of change, such as the sculptor in the case of the production of the statue, and the final cause that for the sake of which there is a change, such as the goal of the sculptor in producing the statue.2 This account presupposes a broader concept of causality than that with which we are now familiar.3 Yet it also is broader than the concept that Descartes employed, since he tended to understand causality exclusively in terms of efficient causes.4 It is not too surprising that this shift to a focus on efficient causation has a history. What is perhaps surprising, though, is that the development of the Aristotelian theory of causation in early modern scholasticism prepared the way for the shift reflected in Descartes’s writings. To understand this shift adequately, we need to consider the scholastic context in which it occurred. The general claim that Descartes’s views cannot be adequately understood in abstraction from their relation to developments in scholasticism is of course not new. There is an established tradition in the French literature of emphasizing this relation, and several recent English-language studies have focused on Descartes’s debts to scholasticism with respect to issues in metaphysics, natural philosophy, and psychology.5 What is new, however, is my sustained attempt here to use our knowledge of scholastic treatments of causality as a key for deciphering Descartes’s often-cryptic remarks concerning various kinds of causal connections. Sometimes the relevance of the scholastic context is uncontroversial, as in the case of the appeal in the Third Meditation to the formal or eminent containment of the effect in its efficient cause. However, the overarching thesis of this study is that Descartes’s theory of causation is in fundamental respects similar to a medieval account of causality that many early modern scholastics rejected. It might be thought that the medieval account to which I refer is occasionalism, the view that God is the only real cause and creatures merely “occasional causes” of changes in nature. After all, we will discover that such a view has medieval origins, and that it was almost universally rejected in early modern scholasticism. Furthermore,

2. The characterizations of the causes, but not all of the particular examples, are drawn from Aristotle’s remarks in Physics II.3, 194b15–195a1 (Aristotle 1984, 1:332–33). 3. For a discussion that emphasizes the oddity of the Aristotelian concept of causality from a more contemporary perspective, see Frede 1980. Frede draws attention to the narrowing of this concept in the work of the Stoics. 4. Though see the complications for Descartes’s restriction to efficient causality that I discuss in §2.1.2 (ii). 5. The classic discussion in the French literature of Descartes’s connections to scholasticism is Gilson 1930; see also Gilson 1913a and 1925. For a critique of the understanding of these connections in Gilson, see Dalbriez 1929 (cf. chapter 2, note 42, on the Gilson-Dalbriez debate). For examples of recent work in English on the scholastic context of Descartes’s work, see Des Chene 1996, 2000a, and 2001; Rozemond 1998; Ariew 1999; and Secada 2000.

Introduction

5

several of Descartes’s Cartesian successors endorsed various versions of occasionalism, the strongest form of which is present in the work of the French Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche.6 As the introductory remarks in chapter 1 document, the view that Descartes himself was an occasionalist, and indeed, the father of occasionalism, dates from the seventeenth century. More recently, commentators have continued to defend occasionalist readings of Descartes. Perhaps the classical source in the English-language literature for such readings is Norman (later, Kemp) Smith’s 1902 text, Studies in Cartesian Philosophy. In this work, Smith claims to find in Descartes the view that God conserves bodies by re-creating them at each moment, and he takes such a view to support the occasionalist conclusion that bodies “cannot be capable of causing changes in one another: not having sufficient reality to persist, they cannot have sufficient force to act” (Smith 1902, 73–74). In addition, Smith argues that the implication of Descartes’s dualism that mind and body have radically different natures leads inevitably to the denial of genuine mind–body interaction. Though he admits that Descartes sometimes asserted that there is such interaction, Smith insists that this evidence reveals merely that he “inconsistently and vainly attempts to escape occasionalism,” concluding that “the inevitable consequences of his rationalism are one and all emphasized by his successor, Malebranche” (85).7 Smith’s emphasis on the problems for causal interaction deriving from Descartes’s dualism is linked to what Bernard Williams has called “the scandal of Cartesian interactionism,” which scandal derives from the fact that there is “something deeply mysterious about the interaction which Descartes’s theory required between two items of totally disparate natures, the immaterial soul, and the [pineal] gland or any other part of an extended body” (Williams 1978, 287). There is the claim in the literature that at certain moments, at least, Descartes was led by his recognition of the scandalous problem of mind–body interaction to deny that mind and body, as entities with distinct natures, can be real efficient causes of changes in each other.8 But commentators also

6. For a survey of the different forms of occasionalism in the work of Cartesians such as Clauberg, Clerselier, Cordemoy, La Forge, and Malebranche, see Prost 1907; Gouhier 1926, ch. 3; Specht 1966, chs. 2 and 3; and Nadler 1997. 7. In his New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes, (now, Kemp) Smith emphasizes more Descartes’s distance from Malebranche; see Smith 1952, 212–17. Even in this text, however, Smith claims that the occasionalism of Geulincx and Malebranche “may be explained” by the view in Descartes that “God, in His re-creation of things, has to be regarded as continuously modifying them in an orderly fashion” (218–19). 8. For the textbook view that early modern occasionalism is a response to the scandalous problem, see the references in the works cited in chapter 1, note 1. An example of the view that Descartes took this problem to preclude mind–body interaction is provided by Keeling’s claim: “The defining attributes of mind and body being wholly different and mutually exclusive, direct causal interaction between them, [Descartes] maintains, is necessarily impossible” (Keeling 1968, 153). For variations on this claim, see Radner 1971, 1985a, and 1985b; Mattern 1978; Broughton and Mattern 1978; Baker and Morris 1996, 138–62; and Gorham 1999. In Broughton 1986, there is the more limited conclusion that Descartes was led by his conception of the differences between mind and body to rule out genuine body-to-mind action in sensation.

6

DESCARTES ON CAUSATION

have revived Smith’s conclusion that Descartes was committed to occasionalism in his physics. There is, for instance, Daniel Garber’s claim that “it seems to me as clear as anything that, for Descartes, God is the only cause of motion in the inanimate world of bodies, that bodies cannot be genuine causes of change in the physical world of extended substance” (Garber 1993, 12).9 Despite their differences, the various interpretations connected to Smith’s early discussion agree in taking Descartes’s system to deviate from the standard scholastic position that both material and immaterial creatures make a genuine causal contribution to natural interactions. Nevertheless, the deviant account of causation that I attribute to Descartes is not occasionalism; in fact, the view I have in mind is, in the context of the medieval scholastic debate over causality, the antipode of occasionalism, namely, the view that creatures rather than God are the real causes of natural change. This “mere conservationism”—so called because God’s role in natural causation is limited to the creation and conservation of the world10—was simply too radical for most scholastics. At the beginning of the early modern period, the received scholastic view was a “concurrentism” that allowed, against occasionalism, that creatures have real causal power but that nonetheless held, against mere conservationism, that God contributes a causal “concursus” to every creaturely action. Descartes admittedly helped himself to the language of concurrence in his discussions of causation. This fact serves to explain why recent critics of occasionalist readings of Descartes’s theory of causation have attempted to link this theory to a more standard sort of scholastic concurrentism.11 However, I find reasons internal to Descartes’s system—drawn particularly from his account of causation in physics—for the conclusion that created entities rather than God are the true causes of natural change. Given this conclusion, the challenge for Descartes is to reconcile the claim that creatures are causally efficacious not only with the fundamental tenets of his ontology but also with the doctrine, which he inherited from the scholastics, that the created world can remain in existence only because God continually conserves it. Scholasticism also turns out to be relevant to the debate in the literature over the purported “scandal of Cartesian interaction.” I have mentioned that this scandal is supposed to derive from the fact that mind and body differ in nature. Critics have

9. There is a more detailed defense of this claim in Garber 1992, ch. 9. Garber’s occasionalist reading of Descartes’s physics is anticipated not only in Smith 1902 but also in Machamer 1976, 178–80, and Hatfield 1979, and it is embraced in Bennett 2001, 1:98–100, and Gorham 2004, 400–403. See also Des Chene 1996, 312–41. In contrast to Smith, however, Garber emphasizes that his interpretation does not take Descartes to be an occasionalist in a Malebranchean sense, since it allows him to attribute causal powers to finite minds as well as to God; see Garber 1992, 299–305. 10. This label was not used in the medieval or early modern periods but derives from the contemporary literature; see chapter 1, note 4. 11. See, for instance, Della Rocca 1999 and forthcoming; Pessin 2003; and Hattab 2000, 2003, and 2007. See also Clatterbaugh 1995 and 1999, ch. 3, though Clatterbaugh emphasizes that the kind of concurrentism he attributes to Descartes differs fundamentally from the old scholastic version of this doctrine.

Introduction

7

charged that what renders this sort of difference incompatible with mind–body interaction is Descartes’s scholastic axiom requiring the containment of the reality of an effect in its cause.12 Over the past couple of decades, several apologists have responded on Descartes’s behalf that the axiom itself is perfectly consistent with his own commitment to mind–body interaction.13 However, this line of defense has not always been supplemented with a detailed consideration of the relevant scholastic context of this axiom.14 Here I make such a consideration the centerpiece of my argument that this axiom raises no general problem in Descartes for mind–body interaction. Yet in contrast to much of the apologetic literature, I also claim that there were in scholasticism specific difficulties for interaction between material and immaterial entities that were more pressing for Descartes than the purportedly scandalous problem that has tended to preoccupy recent commentators. As the foregoing remarks indicate, there is an emphasis in this study on the context, and more specifically the scholastic context, of Descartes’s theory of causation. Chapter 1 is devoted to a consideration of that context. I start with a brief account of the origins of occasionalism in medieval Islamic theology and then turn to the rejection of this account of causation in later medieval thought. Though concurrentism was the dominant alternative to occasionalism offered during this period, I also consider arguments for the more radical mere conservationist alternative. In addition to the medieval responses to occasionalism, though, an important part of the scholastic context of Descartes’s theory of causation is provided by the distinctive metaphysical framework for efficient causality in the work of the early modern scholastic Francisco Suárez. I highlight in particular those features of this framework that prepare the way for the transition from a more traditional Aristotelian view of causality to what we find in Descartes. Then I turn in chapter 2 from the scholastic context to Descartes’s own views, starting with an endorsement of basic causal axioms that reveals most clearly his debts to scholasticism. Here I counter the suspicion that his discussion of these axioms does not reflect a particularly deep view of causality. Indeed, I argue that Descartes is best read as adapting abstract constraints that he inherited from the scholastics to fit his radically anti-scholastic ontology. Yet though I side with the apologists in taking Descartes’s causal axioms to allow for the causal efficacy of created beings, I also emphasize the negative point that his remarks concerning these axioms do not settle the issue of his final position regarding the three main accounts of causation that emerged from the medieval period, namely, occasionalism, concurrentism, and mere conservationism. To discern his true intentions with respect to these accounts, we need to consider Descartes’s treatments of concrete instances of causal interaction. Chapter 3 concerns the treatment in Descartes’s physics of body–body interaction. We have already encountered the occasionalist interpretation of Descartes’s physics.

12. Thus, the axiom is prominent in discussions in the literature cited in note 8. 13. See, for instance, Richardson 1982 and 1985; Loeb 1981, 134–49, and 1985; Bedau 1986; O’Neill 1987; Jolley 1987; Schmaltz 1992b; and Wilson 1999b. 14. An important exception to this is O’Neill 1987; I discuss her reading of Descartes’s causal axiom further in §2.1.3 (ii).

8

DESCARTES ON CAUSATION

Such an interpretation may seem to be confirmed by his own claim—central to the metaphysical foundations of his physics—that God is the “universal and primary cause” of motion.15 However, I argue that the particular account in Descartes of the “ordinary concursus” that God provides as primary cause of motion in fact supports the mere conservationist position that such a concursus consists simply in the continued creation of matter in motion. Changes in motion are to be explained by appeal not to this concursus but rather to the features of bodies that correspond to the bodily “forces” that Descartes posited in his physics. In chapter 4, I consider causal interaction in the context of Descartes’s dualistic psychology. As even Smith acknowledges, Descartes explicitly allowed for genuine causes other than God in the case of both body-to-mind action and mind-to-body action. In each case, however, there are complications for his account of causation that differ from the more familiar scandal of Cartesian interactionism but that are linked to earlier scholastic discussions. Moreover, Descartes’s conservationist physics creates difficulties for his view of mind-to-body action that he never fully confronted. Even so, his suggestion throughout is that God’s contribution to mind–body interaction is exhausted by his continued production of the natures that serve to explain such interaction. Finally, in chapter 5 I take up the special considerations for Descartes’s theory of causation that arise from the case of our free action. In this case especially it is important not to succumb to the temptation of taking the easy way out by considering his views in abstraction from their scholastic context. We can adequately understand what he has to say about human freedom only in relation to different views within scholasticism concerning the “indifference” of our free action and of the compatibility of that action with divine foreknowledge and providence. Descartes’s discussion of human freedom is distinguished from all other scholastic accounts by the fact that it presupposes his idiosyncratic doctrine of the divine creation of eternal truths. However, it turns out that the implication of this doctrine that God is the cause even of truths concerning our free action does not compromise Descartes’s considered position that our undetermined will, rather than God, is the immediate causal source of that action. Once again I find reason to distance Descartes not only from occasionalism but also from the concurrentism that was so prominent in early modern scholasticism.

15. See the view in Smith 1902 discussed above, as well as the literature cited in note 9.

1

The Scholastic Context

In his 1696 Doubts concerning the Physical System of Occasional Causes (Doutes sur le systeme physique des causes occasionnelles), the then-future perpetual secretary of the Paris Académie des sciences, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, offered an introductory histoire des causes occasionnelles. There he claims that “occasional causes are not ancient,” but in fact derive from the dualism of Descartes. Descartes’s view that mind as thinking substance is really distinct from body as extended substance introduced “an extreme disproportion between that which is extended and that which thinks.” Given this disproportion, the question arose “how bodily motions cause thoughts in the soul” and “how thoughts in the soul cause motions in the body.” Recognizing that motion and thought “have no natural connection” and therefore cannot “be regarded as real causes,” Descartes “invented” the theory of occasional causes, according to which “God on the occasion of bodily motion, could imprint a thought in the soul, or on the occasion of a thought of the soul, imprint a motion in body” (Fontenelle 1989–2001, 1:529–30). Here is an early source for the old textbook view that occasionalism arose from the problem in Descartes of explaining how substances as different in nature as mind and body could interact. In fairness to Fontenelle, it must be said that he does not endorse the suggestion in the textbooks that occasionalism is merely an ad hoc solution to the Cartesian problem of mind–body interaction.1 He notes in the Doubts, after all, that Descartes appealed to the “occasional causes that owed their birth to the system of the soul” in order to provide an explanation of how motion can be communicated in collision. 1. For the textbook view, see also the English-language literature cited in Nadler 1997, 75–76, n.1, and the German- and English-language literature cited in Perler and Rudolph 2000, 15, n.1. The authors of the texts including these citations are themselves critical of this view.

9

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DESCARTES ON CAUSATION

According to Fontenelle, Descartes made “God the true cause that, on the occasion of the collision of two bodies, transported the motion of the one into the other” (1:530). To an extent, then, Fontenelle anticipates the recent objection that early modern occasionalism addressed problems concerning the physics of force, as well as those concerning the metaphysics of dualism.2 Even so, the view common to Fontenelle and the textbooks that occasionalism originated in Descartes is, in a word, false. In fact, the theory was quite ancient by the time of Descartes’s birth. Occasionalism owes its origins not to Cartesian metaphysics and physics, but rather to a view of divine omnipotence that was prominent within a certain group of medieval Islamic theologians. Islamic occasionalism was subject to attack during the High Middle Ages, when a consensus was reached that settled on the position that God as “primary” cause communicates his power to “secondary” causes in nature. Later thinkers proposed importantly different accounts of secondary causality, but by the beginning of the seventeenth century occasionalism was all but a dead theory. So much so, in fact, that one early modern scholastic—to be discussed below—could find no recent author who unequivocally endorsed the view that “created things do nothing but that God instead effects all things in their presence” (MD XVIII.1, ¶1, 1:593). At best, then, problems in Descartes led to the revival of an old and, by the start of the early modern period, largely discredited theory of occasionalism. The question of whether Descartes himself endorsed a version of occasionalism is one that we will address in due course. Before taking up his views concerning causation, however, we need to consider the context in which these views were developed. This context is provided by Aristotelian scholasticism, which at the beginning of the early modern period was a dominant intellectual force in Europe. The importance of scholasticism is particularly evident given Descartes’s own appeals in his discussions of causation in the Meditations and elsewhere to scholastic axioms such as that the effect must be contained “formally or eminently” in its cause and that the continued existence of the world depends on a divine act not distinct from his creation of that world (see chapter 2). Closer consideration reveals that the axioms to which Descartes appealed were in fact linked to profoundly anti-occasionalist theories of causation. By itself, this fact does not reveal that Descartes himself rejected occasionalism. There remains the possibility that he had a revolutionary understanding of the old scholastic concepts. But to see what he did in fact think, we need to consider how he stood in relation to scholastic accounts of causation. In §1.1, I begin my consideration of the scholastic context of Descartes’s theory of causation with the medieval rejection (or, better, rejections) of occasionalism. I turn first to the most prominent form of occasionalism in the medieval period, which derives from the Islamic tradition. My somewhat selective survey of Islamic occasionalism focuses on the discussion of this position in two important medieval sources. Then I examine two different alternatives to this theory in the work of Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), the Dominican church father, and of his Dominican

2. For this objection, see, for instance, Nadler 1997. Cf. the similar anticipation in the views in Smith 1902 considered in the introduction.

The Scholastic Context

11

critic, the theologian and bishop Durandus of Saint Pourçain (†1334). Thomas held against the occasionalists that though all operations in nature involve the operation of the divine will, nonetheless God acts with “secondary causes” to bring about natural effects. He concluded that the divine operation that results in such effects is compatible with the genuine efficacy of these secondary causes. Here Thomas offered a view that Dominik Perler and Ulrich Rudolph, in their comprehensive study of medieval and early-modern occasionalism, have labeled “causal compatibilism.”3 Durandus later protested that Thomas’s response to the occasionalists deprives creatures of their causal power, and claimed that occasionalism can be resisted only if the divine contribution to creaturely causality is limited to God’s creation and conservation of secondary causes. Durandus’s “mere conservationism,” as Alfred Freddoso has called it,4 was widely rejected in later scholasticism, and it may seem to provide no more than a footnote to the story of the medieval rejection of occasionalism.5 However, we will discover that his position is surprisingly relevant to Descartes’s theory of causation. In §1.2, though, I move to an account of causation in closer temporal proximity to Descartes, namely, the one in the work of the prominent early modern scholastic, the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). In singling out Suárez, I do not mean to suggest that his position is representative of scholasticism in general. In fact, it has become increasingly clear to scholars that early modern scholasticism was not a monolithic doctrine, but involved different mixtures of nominalist, Ockhamist, Scotist, or hard-line Thomist positions with basic Aristotelian doctrines.6 But though Suárez was merely one scholastic among many, he is particularly important for our purposes, since he wrote what is perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of causality in the early modern period. In this treatment, which he included in his massive Metaphysical Disputations (Disputationes Metaphysicæ) (1657), Suárez follows Aristotelian orthodoxy in distinguishing four main causes, namely, material, formal, efficient, and final.7 Yet he anticipates Descartes’s views in taking efficient causality to provide the paradigmatic instance of causation. Moreover, as part of his treatment of efficient causality, Suárez offers a sophisticated account of God’s causal contribution to the course of nature. In particular, he develops positions in Thomas by arguing not only that divine conservation is required for the world to remain in existence, but also that this act of conservation does not differ from God’s initial act of creation ex nihilo. He further articulates Thomas’s causal compatibilist alternative to occasionalism in terms of the position that God contributes a “concursus” to the action of secondary causes that is distinct from his act of conserving such causes in existence. I close in §1.3 with a brief consideration of the path from the scholastic account of causality in Suárez to Descartes’s theory of causation. Descartes’s theory is coupled

3. See Perler and Rudolph 2000, 154, which refers to Thomas’s position as “Kompatibilismus als Gegenmodell zum Occasionalismus.” 4. See Freddoso 1991. 5. As it is, indeed, in Perler and Rudolph 2000, 245, n.1. 6. For two recent discussions of early modern scholasticism that draw attention to its complexity, see Des Chene 1996 and Menn 1997. 7. But see note 31.

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with a spare ontology that does away with many of the forms and qualities that are prominent in Suárez’s account. Nevertheless, I have indicated that Suárez’s emphasis on efficient causality prepares the way for Descartes. Moreover, the discussions in Suárez of divine creation and conservation are linked to Descartes’s own treatment of these notions, which are central to his theory of causation. Far more than the position of the medieval Islamic occasionalists, Suárez’s views provide an appropriate standard against which to measure what Descartes has to say about causation.

1.1. MEDIEVAL REJECTIONS OF OCCASIONALISM 1.1.1. Medieval Islamic Occasionalism Medieval Islamic occasionalism is an extraordinarily complex historical phenomenon, involving various debates among Islamic theologians and philosophers dating from the eighth century. I cannot hope in my brief survey here to provide an exhaustive discussion of its development.8 However, I would like to present some basic features of the position by means of a consideration of two medieval sources, the first a late-twelfth century discussion of Islamic occasionalism from an outsider, and the second an insider’s account of this position dating from the end of the eleventh century. The former is found in the Guide of the Perplexed (Dala- lat al-Ha- ’irı-n) (c. 1190), a text of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, better known by his Greek name, Maimonides. Chapter 73 of the first part of the Guide concerns the views of the Mutakallimu-n, a group of “dialectical theologians” within medieval Islam. At the time Maimonides wrote, there were two main schools within this group, the first the Basrah School of Mu‘tazila, and the second the Ash‘arite School associated with the former Mu‘tazilite, the tenth-century theologian As‘arı- (Abu- l’Hasan al-As‘arı-). There are various methodological and doctrinal differences between the two schools,9 but the one most important difference for our purposes concerns the issue of causality. In particular, Maimonides notes that whereas most of the Mu‘tazilites allowed that created powers can produce effects, the majority of the Ash‘arites regarded as “abhorrent” the view that such powers displace God as the cause of effects in nature (Maimonides 1963, 1:203). The Ash‘arites were thus the main medieval proponents of the occasionalist doctrine that God is the only real cause. In chapter 73, Maimonides offers twelve “premises” that he took to be common to the Mutakallimu-n. Given the disagreement over occasionalism, he understandably did not include this doctrine in the list. However, the issue of occasionalism is

8. But see the thorough treatment of medieval Islamic occasionalism in Perler and Rudoph 2000, 23–124. 9. For instance, the Mu‘tazalites tended to emphasize more the power of natural human reason to discover moral and political truths, whereas the Ash‘arites tended to emphasize its limitations with respect to the grasp of such truths. Moreover, members of the former school tended to emphasize the indeterministic freedom of the human will, whereas members of the latter school tended to emphasize God’s predetermination of all events, including human action.

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broached in Maimonides’ discussion of the sixth premise, namely, that an accident cannot “endure for two units of time” (Maimonides 1963, 1:194). The third premise attributed to the Mutakallimu-n has it that these units are discrete indivisible instants that compose time. Maimonides claims that it was a view of “the majority” that in order for a certain type of accident to endure over time, God must create at different instants numerically distinct accidents of the same species (1:200).10 Moreover, when there is any change in accidents, it is God who brings about this change. Thus, “when we, as we think, dye a garment red, it is not we who are by any means the dyers; God rather creates the color in question in the garment when the latter is in juxtaposition with the red dye” (1:201). In general, the view attributed to the Mutakallimu-n is that “God creates at every one of the instants—I mean the separate units of time—an accident in every individual among the beings, whether that individual be an angel, a heavenly sphere, or something else” (1:203). The evidence that the Mutakallimu-n endorsed an atomistic conception of time seems to be rather thin. One commentator has claimed that the only clear endorsement of such a conception is found in a single text of one of Maimonides’ Islamic contemporaries, Fakhr al’Dı-n al-Ra-zı-, who was in fact not a typical Mutakallim (see Schwartz 1991, 177).11 However, Maimonides may well have thought that the conclusion that time is atomistic simply follows from other doctrines that predominate in the writings of the Mutakallimu-n. Indeed, in the Guide he claims that such a conception follows merely from the first premise he attributed to these thinkers, according to which every body is composed of indivisible atomic parts. If this conception does follow from the premise, then there would be good reason to attribute it to the Mutakallimu-n, since almost all such thinkers accepted an atomistic account of matter (see Schwarz 1991, 169). Maimonides’ argument that it does so follow appeals to the result in Aristotle that distance, time, and local motion must be proportionate (Maimonides 1963, 1:196).12 Given this result, if time were infinitely divisible, the particles that these thinkers took to be atomic would have to be infinitely divisible as well. One problem for this argument is that the infinite divisibility of time seems to require the infinite divisibility not of the particles themselves, but only of the distance they travel. However, another option for Maimonides would be to link the atomistic conception of time to the sixth premise that accidents cannot endure through time. This proposition can be found in Islamic texts dating back to ninth century, and was indeed, as Maimonides reports, a view popular among the Ash‘arites, who formed the majority of the Mutakallimu-n (see Schwarz 1991, 194).13 Given this opinion, it would seem

10. Maimonides mentions the minority view of the Mu’tazilites that certain accidents can endure through time. 11. Indeed, Schwarz’s conclusion is that of the twelve premises mentioned in the Guide, the evidence confirms a source in the writings of the Mutakalimu-n only for “Maimonides’ premises 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 11. For the rest of the premises the evidence seems partial at best” (Schwarz 1991, 172). 12. This result follows in turn from the Aristotelian definition of time as the measure of motion. 13. Schwarz notes that the Ash‘arite Ba-qilla-nı- (†1013) defined an accident as that which cannot exist longer than an instant (Schwarz 1991, 185).

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to follow that accidents cannot endure through any divisible portion of time, and so can exist only at an indivisible instant. Of course, the atomistic conception of time does not itself entail that God alone can be a cause of the accidents that exist at any given moment. Maimonides indicates that Islamic occasionalists attempted to rule out the claim that accidents can cause other accidents by appealing to the premise that “an accident does not go beyond its substratum” (Maimonides 1963, 1:202). This premise seems to derive from the thought that an accident is something that merely inheres in its substance, and thus that is incapable of bringing about anything other than this inherence. Such a premise still seems to leave open the possibility that the substance produces the accident that inheres in it. However, one reason to rule out the substance as a cause is suggested by the view, which Maimonides attributes to the Mutakallimu-n, that earlier and later accidents are linked by means of a “habit” that God imposes (1:201). We can understand this habit to consist in a lawlike correlation between the accidents. Even if a substance could produce its own accidents, it does not follow that it can institute the law that serves to connect these accidents to other accidents. Indeed, the assumption among the Mutakallimu-n is that only God could establish a lawlike correlation that holds for all of the relevant accidents. Thus in the case of a human agent moving a pen, it must be that “God has instituted the habit that the motion of the hand is concomitant with the motion of the pen, without the hand exercising in any respect an influence on, or being causative in regard to, the motion of the pen” (1:202). God institutes the habit operative in this case by producing in successive instants the accidents that constitute the motion of the pen. In the medieval Islamic philosophical tradition, there was an alternative to this account of the lawlike habits that hold in nature. Drawing on a mixture of Aristotelian and Platonic (or Neoplatonic) positions, philosophers such as Fara-bı- (Abu- Nasr Muhammad al-Fara-bı-), in the tenth century, and Avicenna (Abu- ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn Sı--na-), in the eleventh century, insisted that the natural course of events derives necessarily from certain “forms” that though emanating ultimately from God through pure intelligences, nonetheless exist in created objects. Perhaps the most direct response among the Ash‘arites to this position in “the philosophers” was provided by Ghaza-lı- (Abu- Hamid al-Ghaza-lı-). In his Incoherence of the Philosophers (Taha-fut al-Fala-sifah) (c. 1095)—our second medieval source for Islamic occasionalism—Ghaza-lı- offers refutations of the purported demonstrations in the work of the Islamic philosophers of twenty propositions concerning metaphysics and the natural sciences. The discussion of propositions concerning the natural sciences begins with the seventeenth proposition, according to which any departure from the natural course of events is impossible. To defend the possibility of miraculous events, Ghaza-lı- argues that the relations between natural causes and their effects are not absolutely necessary since they derive ultimately from the divine will. The sort of causes and effects of concern in the natural sciences “are connected as the result of the decree of God (holy be his name), which preceded their existence” (Ghaza-lı- 1958, 185). In contrast to what one might expect from Maimonides’ remarks in chapter 73 of the first part of the Guide, the section on causation in the Incoherence emphasizes neither the atomistic conception of time nor the restriction of accidents to a single

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instant.14 Rather, this section opens with what we could call (following Nadler 1996) the “no necessary connection argument.” In particular, the argument is that the relations between what we take to be causes and their effects cannot be necessary given that the affirmation of the existence of the one does not logically require the affirmation of the existence of the other, nor the denial of the existence of the one the denial of the existence of the other (Ghaza-lı- 1958, 185). It may seem a bit of a leap to Ghaza-lı-’s subsequent claim that cause and effect “are connected as a result of the decree of God” (185). Why couldn’t there be some other source of the necessity? However, Ghaza-lı- argued earlier in the Incoherence that the action involved in causation can be attributed only to the will of an agent.15 Moreover, it seems that an effect can follow necessarily only from the will of an omnipotent being. To be sure, Ghaza-lı-’s claim that God acts either directly or “through the intermediacy of angels” (186) seems to leave open the possibility that the wills of finite beings necessitate effects. I return to this complication presently. However, it is significant that even in the case in which angels serve as intermediaries, God is said to be the agent responsible for causal relations in nature. Given the strong claim in the Incoherence that causal relations hold only because God “has created them in that fashion, not because the connection in itself is necessary and indissoluble” (Ghaza-lı- 1958, 185), it is not surprising that this text is standardly read as a defense of occasionalism. However, there are some complications for such a reading. I have just noted the complication deriving from the suggestion in the text that God can act through “the intermediacy of angels.” Yet there is the further complication that Ghaza-lı- presents in the Incoherence not one but two alternatives to an account of causation that precludes miraculous events. In addition to the suggestion that God produces the causal correlations either directly or through the intermediacy of angels, he offers a second position that concedes the point of the philosophers that objects have certain attributes in virtue of which they “habitually” produce certain effects, and merely insists that God can miraculously impede or change the speed of natural processes (see Ghaza-lı- 1958, 190–91). In the Incoherence of the Incoherence (Taha-fut al-Taha-fut) (c. 1180), Ghaza-lı-’s twelfth-century critic Averroes (Ibn Rushd) takes the fact that he offered this second account to indicate his abandonment of the strong occasionalist denial of real causal efficacy in nature, and others have insisted more recently on a non-occasionalist interpretation of his views on causation.16 14. It is unclear whether Maimonides read Ghaza-lı-’s work (as indicated in the editorial comments in the introduction to Maimonides 1963, 1:cxxvii). Even if he did read it, however, the fact that he did not take note of Ghaza-lı-’s innovations may be explained by the fact that, as Perler and Rudolph have observed, what twelfth-century Ash‘arite theologians had to say about causality “kingt vielmehr ganz konventionell” than what is found in the Incoherence (Perler and Rudolph 2000, 109; cf. 115). 15. In particular, he argued for this conclusion in a discussion of the third proposition of the philosophers, according to which the created world follows necessarily from God’s nature (see Ghaza-lı- 1958, 63–64). 16. For this charge, see Averroes 1969, 1:316–33. For a more recent example of an interpretation that questions Ghaza-lı-’s commitment to occasionalism, see Frank 1992.

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Nevertheless, there is some reason to think that Ghaza-lı- offers the second account merely for the sake of argument, and not to indicate a shift in his position. After all, his main concern in offering this account is to show that miracles are intelligible even given certain aspects of the view of causation offered by the philosophers.17 Admittedly, the reference to the intermediary action of angels cannot be explained away in this manner. However, I believe that Michael Marmura has shown that when Ghaza-lı- speaks of angels as intermediaries, he means to indicate only “that they are the locus of divine action” (Marmura 1995, 99). This would seem to be in line with the emphasis in the text—which I noted previously—on the fact that the agent ultimately responsible for causal connections in nature is God rather than the angels. In any event, there is in the Incoherence a forceful statement of the occasionalist position that natural causes do not necessitate their effects, but are merely linked to them by divine decree. Moreover, the defense of this position is distinctive in the context of medieval Islamic thought, since it focuses not on the nature of time or of qualities, but rather on the lack of a necessary connection between perceived causes and their effects and the need for a grounding of causal relations in the omnipotent will of God. On both points Ghaza-lı- anticipated the later argument for occasionalism in the work of Nicolas Malebranche. Thus, in his discussion in the 1674/75 Search after Truth (Recherche de la vérité) of the “error of the philosophy of the ancients,” and particularly of the Aristotelian philosophy, regarding causation, Malebranche insists that a true cause by definition “is one such that the mind perceives a necessary connection [liaison nécessaire] between it and its effect,” and that the mind perceives such a connection “only between the will of a necessary being and its effects” (bk. VI-2, ch. 3, Malebranche 1958–84, 2:316/Malebranche 1997, 450). The occasionalist challenge to causal realism that emerges from Ghaza-lı-’s Incoherence is to explain how the doctrine that creatures have real causal power can be reconciled with the result that all connections in nature that do not involve logical necessity derive from acts of the divine will that alone can suffice to establish their effects. A relevant question for us—broached by the remarks in Fontenelle’s Doubts that I considered at the outset of this chapter—is whether Descartes joined Malebranche in issuing this sort of challenge.

1.1.2. Thomas’s Causal Compatibilism In a thirteenth-century text, Questions on the Power of God (Quaestiones de Potentia Dei), Thomas Aquinas devotes an article to a defense of the claim that “God operates in the operations of nature.” However, he is concerned there to distinguish his view from the position reflected “in the law of the Moors, as Rabbi Moses [Maimonides]

17. For this argument, see Marmura 1981. Marmura also emphasizes that the point of the Incoherence is merely to refute the strong views of the philosophers, and not necessarily to defend the final truth on the matters discussed (see Marmura 1981, 98–99). Marmura also responds to Frank’s more revisionist interpretation (see note 16) in Marmura 1995. But cf. the discussion of the Marmura-Frank exchange in Perler and Rudolph 2000, 71–73, which is critical of some features of Marmura’s position.

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relates,” according to which all natural forms are mere accidents that God creates in objects. Thomas’s initial response is that this position is “manifestly repugnant to the senses,” since the senses merely passively receive the effects of sensible objects (QPG III.7, TA 13:58–59). Ghaza-lı- anticipated this response when he noted in the Incoherence that sensory effects “are observed to exist with some other conditions,” but we do not see that such effects “exist by them” (Ghaza-lı- 1958, 186). Yet Thomas adds that it is “repugnant to the divine goodness” that God does not communicate to creatures the power to produce effects. Thus, he insists that “the operations of nature” follow from various created forms.18 Moreover, he responds to the view of the Moors that everything in substance is a mere accident by drawing on his Aristotelian ontology of material substance, according to which such substances possess not only accidental forms, such as that of heat, that inhere in them, but also substantial forms that unite with matter to constitute the substances (TA 13:59). In this view, both kinds of forms serve as principles of natural operations, and thus are not merely passive effects of divine creation.19 Given Aquinas’s position that natural operations derive from accidental and substantial forms, there may seem to be no room for his thesis that God operates in these operations. As we will discover, this was in fact the objection that Durandus later leveled against this thesis. However, Aquinas responds to this line of objection in On the Power of God by insisting that the operation of God in producing effects in nature is compatible with the operations of “secondary causes” in producing those same effects. He appeals here to the fact that we can understand a certain effect to be produced both by an instrument and by an agent who uses that instrument. An example he commonly uses to illustrate the nature of instrumental causality is that of an agent who uses a pen to write. The pen is a real cause of the written words, but is able to be efficacious in this way only because the agent uses it to produce this effect. Similarly, Aquinas holds that though contrary to the view of the Islamic occasionalists, secondary causes can produce effects, nonetheless they cannot produce these effects through their own power ( per virtutem propriam), but must participate in the power of a “primary” or “principal” cause, namely, God. In this way, a secondary cause is “the instrument of the divine power of operating” (instrumentum divinæ virtutis operantis) (QPG III.7, TA 13:60). To understand the nature of this “power of operating,” we need to compare it to the other two divine powers of operation that are essential for the existence of the world, namely, creation and conservation. In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas claims that any being that does not exist by its own nature and thus is a being only “by

18. This response assumes that God can communicate his power to creatures, and thus seems to beg the question against the die-hard occasionalist who insists that it is not possible for God to so communicate, and thereby that his failure to do so does not detract from his goodness. Aquinas offers various other arguments against occasionalism, but these additional arguments also arguably (though I cannot argue here) employ premises the occasionalist would reject. For a discussion of these other anti-occasionalist arguments, see Perler and Rudolph 2000, ch. 4. 19. I say more about the details of Suárez’s version of this position in §1.2.1. See also the remarks concerning Suárez’s metaphysics in §§1.3 and 3.2.1 (iii).

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participation”—that is, any being other than God—can exist in the first place only because of a creative act of God (ST I.44.1). Since all being by participation depends on this creative act, moreover, the act must involve the creation of being from nothing, that is, creation ex nihilo (ST I.45.1). Thomas also holds that just as all beings by participation depend on God’s act of creating ex nihilo to exist in the first place, so they depend on his act of conservation to continue to exist. In arguing for the need for this additional dependence on God, he appeals to the distinction—which, as we will discover in due course, later became important for Descartes20—between causae secundum fieri, or causes of becoming, and causae secundum esse, or causes of being. Thomas notes that though a house can continue to exist without its builder, this is only because the builder is a causa secundum fieri that directly produces not the being of the house and its material, but only its coming to be a house through a certain arrangement of the material. Even in cases of natural operations that involve more than mere arrangement, such as when accidental or substantial forms act to produce similar forms in matter, the former are not causes of the very being of the latter. If they were, the forms would have to cause their own being, which they share with the being of what they produce. Rather, the producing forms merely “educe” produced forms similar to them that are contained potentially in matter (ST I.104.1). In contrast, Thomas claims that in cases where the cause is “more noble” than the effect, it can be a cause secundum esse that produces the being of the form itself. He appeals to the fact that the sun does not merely educe light from the air, but rather creates a new form that “has no root” (non habet radicem) in the nature of air.21 Because the air alone cannot support the existence of this new form, light depends essentially on the continuing action of the sun. Thomas claims that creatures depend on God in the same manner, and thus that without the continued action of God, creatures would cease to exist (ST I.104.1). It is important to emphasize the point here that conservation involves merely the continuation of God’s act of creation. For Thomas himself responds to the objection that conservation cannot add anything to the creature not already provided by creation by noting that God conserves creatures in existence “not by a new action, but by a continuation of that action whereby he gives being” (ST I.104.1, ad 4). In On the Power of God, Aquinas recognizes as an objection to his own position that the only operation of God involved in the operations of nature is that by which he “either makes or conserves in being a natural power” (QPG III.10, TA 13:57). However, he responds that “God is not only the cause of the operations of nature that conserve natural powers in being, but in other modes, as has been said.” What was said in particular is that secondary causes depend on God not only for their initial

20. See the remarks concerning Descartes’s appeal to this distinction in §2.2.1. See also the discussion below of the relation of this distinction to views in Durandus (§1.1.3) and Suárez (§1.2.2 (ii)). 21. Thomas is assuming here that light is a quality that depends essentially on the action of the substantial form of a body that is self-luminous (see ST I.67.4 and ad 1). It is because air is not a self-luminous body that light can have no “root” in it. Cf. chapter 2, note 66.

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and continuing existence but also for the action by which they bring about their effects. A secondary cause “acts as an instrument of a superior power; whence, exclusive of the superior power, the inferior power has no operation” (TA 13:61). The appeal here to instrumental causality in explaining the divine power of operating provides a further reason to distinguish the acts of this power from divine creation and conservation. For when God creates or conserves a secondary cause, he is not using that cause as an instrument, since that cause contributes nothing either to the divine act of creation ex nihilo or to the continuation of that act in conservation. It is only when God is using an already existing secondary cause to bring about an effect in nature that this cause contributes something to the action. Indeed, Aquinas holds that in this case the very same action derives both from God as primary agent and from secondary agents (see, e.g., ST I.105.5, ad 2). Admittedly, this claim would be nonsense if an action were something in the agent. But in fact Aquinas claimed, in line with many later scholastics, that the action is something external to the agent, and so is distinct from the principle in the agent from which the action issues.22 In this scholastic view, action is not that which produces an effect, but rather the actualization of that effect, which actualization occurs in the patient. Thus, the fact that God as primary agent and secondary agents act by means of distinct principles need not imply that the actions deriving from those principles are distinct. The premise that a single action can proceed from both God and creatures is key to Thomas’s causal compatibilism, since without this premise the causal activity would have to be attributed either to God alone, thus resulting in occasionalism, or to the creature alone, thus overturning the conclusion in Thomas that God operates in all operations of nature. We have seen already a willingness among the Mutakallimu-n to embrace the occasionalist horn of this dilemma. But there also was a member of Thomas’s own Dominican order who was willing to embrace the other horn, and so to restrict the divine contribution to natural operations to creation and conservation. In §1.2 we will explore the further development of Thomas’s causal compatibilism in the work of the early modern scholastic Suárez. Before making the transition to the early modern period, however, we need to consider the more radical medieval rejection of occasionalism in a text of Thomas’s Dominican critic, Durandus of Saint Pourçain.

1.1.3. Durandus’s Mere Conservationism Durandus was a controversial fourteenth-century figure whose critique of certain theological doctrines in Thomas earned him two censures from Dominican authorities eager to identify the order with Thomism.23 However, we are concerned here with his challenge to Thomistic metaphysics, and in particular with the critique

22. But see note 58. 23. In particular, Durandus was censured in 1314 and 1317 for rejecting more orthodox Thomistic views on the nature of the distinctions among and the processions of the persons of the Trinity. For more on the theological dispute that Durandus triggered in the Dominican order, see Iribarren 2005.

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of Thomas’s causal compatibilism that he offers in the second book of On the Theological Sentences of the Commentary of Peter Lombard in Four Books (In Sententias Theologicas Petri Lonmbardi Commentariorum Libri Quattuor). The fifth quaestio of the first distinctio of this section of Durandus’s Sentences is devoted to Thomas’s claim in the Summa Theologiae that “God acts immediately in all actions of creatures” (S II.1.5, 1:130, citing ST I.103.6 and 105.5). Durandus there agrees with Thomas that “the being of a secondary cause . . . is the immediate effect of the primary cause, which is an immediate cause not only in bringing it into being, but also in conserving it in being” (S II.1.5, ¶17, 1:131). He also concurs in Thomas’s rejection of occasionalism, holding that “this view is now rejected by everyone as improbable, because it denies of things their proper operations and also denies the sensory judgment by which we experience that created things act on one another” (¶4, 1:130). What he cannot accept, however, is Thomas’s view that the claim that God acts immediately in all actions of secondary causes is compatible with the attribution of real efficacy to those causes. For Durandus, the only acceptable alternative to occasionalism is the “mere conservationist” position that God contributes only the creation and continued conservation of a secondary cause to the production of an effect by that cause. Durandus’s initial point against Thomas is that one who holds that God acts immediately in every action of a creature cannot say merely that God is responsible for a certain feature of an effect. In the case of the generation of a material substance, for instance, it would not be sufficient to claim that God produces the matter of that substance, whereas the secondary cause produces its form. For then God would not be acting immediately in the production of the form by the secondary cause (S II.1.5, ¶6, 1:130). Thus, defenders of the Thomistic position must go further in claiming that the effects of secondary causes “are from God as wholes and immediately, but not totally, that is, not in every way” (¶7, 1:130). The effects must be from God “as wholes and immediately” to avoid what we could call “the problem of the divided effect,” according to which God is responsible for one part of the effect, the secondary cause for another. But if the effects were from God “totally, in every way,” then the secondary cause would seem to be doing no work, just as the occasionalist contends.24 So there needs to be some sort of complementary contribution to the production of one and the same effect. What Durandus cannot comprehend is how an effect could be from God as a whole and immediately but not totally. He considers the suggestion, deriving from Aristotle’s remarks in the Physics, that universal aspects of an effect can be traced back to a universal cause, whereas particular aspects of the same effect can be traced back to a particular cause (S II.1.5, ¶8, 1:130). And Thomas himself suggested

24. One might think that there is the possibility of causal overdetermination. Durandus’s response to this possibility is that since actions are individuated by their effects, diverse actions cannot result in numerically the same effects (S II.1.5, ¶13, 1:131). Suárez later countered that though an effect cannot have more than one total cause in a certain order, it can have different total causes in different subordinated orders (MD XXVI.4, 1:929–35*). For more on this response in Suárez, see §1.2.3 (ii).

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this model of God’s contribution to natural operations when he claimed in On the Power of God that “instances of the causing of absolute being [entis absolute] are traced back to the first universal cause, whereas the causing of the other things that are superadded to the esse, or are that by which the esse is made specific, pertains to the secondary causes” (QPG III.1, TA 13:38). However, Durandus insists that in a living thing, for instance, esse and the determination of that esse as something involving life differ only “by reason” (ratione), that is, merely conceptually and not in reality. Since the effects in this case differ only by reason, it would seem that the causes differ only by reason as well (S II.1.5, ¶10, 1:130). By the same token, according to Durandus, “it is impossible for numerically the same action to be from two or more agents in such a way that it is immediately and completely from each, unless numerically the same power is in them” (¶11, 1:131). Numerically the same power cannot be present in God and creatures insofar as God’s power is infinite, whereas the power in creatures is limited in nature. Thus, for Durandus, it cannot be said that the very same effect derives immediately and completely from both God and creatures. For God and creatures to cooperate in producing an effect, it must be the case that the power in God is responsible for one feature of the effect, whereas the power in creatures is responsible for another feature of the effect that is distinct in reality from the feature God produces. It might be thought that this line of response simply begs the question against Aquinas in assuming that distinct powers cannot produce the same effect. Indeed, Aquinas offered instrumental causality as an example of a case where the same effect issues from both the instrument and the agent using that instrument. Why couldn’t the same be true in the case of God’s action with secondary causes? 25 Durandus objects to the comparison to instrumental causality by appealing to the possibility that an action derive principally from a secondary cause. Since “an action that does not exceed the power [virtute] of the species of the agent is sufficiently elicited by just the power of the species,” in this case “it would be superfluous to posit another immediate principle eliciting such an action” (S II.1.5, ¶11, 1:131). We will discover presently that Suárez attempted to address this objection by drawing a distinction between instrumental and principal causality that nonetheless provides room for God’s “concursus” in the case of the action of principal secondary causes (see §1.2.3 (ii)). However, Durandus could argue that there is an additional problem with the analogy to instrumental causality. In particular, he could point out that in the case of the use of the pen, the fact that the words are black and the fact that there are certain words rather than others pick out distinct effects. On the Aristotelian view common to Thomas and Durandus, the color and the shape of the words are different accidental features of it. Durandus thus could argue that in this case these distinct effects derive from distinct causes. This line of argument does not establish that there are no cases in which the same effect derives from different powers. Indeed, it is not clear to me that Durandus has an argument for this conclusion that does not rely on the assumption that distinct

25. For this line of objection to Durandus, see Freddoso 1994, 148–50.

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causal powers cannot issue in the very same effect. In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas allows there cannot be more than one complete cause of a single effect that belongs to the same causal order, thus ruling out a kind of causal overdetermination. However, he also claims that such an illicit overdetermination is not present in the case of God’s cooperative action with secondary causes, since these causes belong to a different causal order than God (ST I.105.5, ad 2).26 Given that Durandus failed to address this distinction between total causes of the same order and total causes of different orders, his argument for the impossibility of Thomistic causal compatibilism cannot be regarded as conclusive. Nevertheless, it will turn out that the question of whether Durandus succeeded in refuting Thomas is less important for our purposes than the question of whether his mere conservationism is itself a tenable position.27 Thus, it is appropriate that we now switch from offense to defense, as it were, and consider Suárez’s argument against Durandus that the conclusion that God acts “immediately in every action of the creature” simply follows from the claim, on which Durandus himself insisted, that all beings depend on God immediately for their conservation in existence once they are produced. For Suárez, creatures are no less dependent on God for their initial production than they are for their subsequent conservation. As he expresses the argument, [I]f it is not the case that all things come to exist immediately from God, then neither is it the case that they are conserved immediately, since a thing is related to being [esse] in the same way it is related to becoming [fieri]. For the being of a thing cannot depend more on an adequate cause after it has been made than it did when it was made. (MD XXII.1, ¶7, 1:803)

This argument is strengthened by Suárez’s doctrine that the act by which God conserves a being in existence is merely a continuation of the act by which he causes that being to exist in the first place (see §1.2.3 (i)). Given this doctrine, it would be natural to conclude that if God is not the immediate source of the existence of an object, he cannot conserve that object by continuing the act by which he immediately produced it. However, there is a way of expressing the point of Suárez’s argument that does not rely on his particular account of divine conservation. For one basic objection here is that given that a secondary cause can immediately and completely produce the esse of an object on its own, there seems to be no reason to deny that it can immediately and completely conserve that esse. Suárez notes that it is as obvious to the senses that there are conserving secondary causes as it is that there are productive

26. Cf. the remarks in note 24. 27. I would just mention, however, Freddoso’s proposal that one can make sense of the fact that God and secondary causes make different contributions to the effect not by splitting the effect, as Durandus requires, but rather by distinguishing different states of affairs that concern a unitary effect (Freddoso 1994, 150). As Freddoso himself admits, this proposal is in need of further articulation and defense, and it is not entirely clear that when these are provided we will have a viable alternative to Durandus’s position. But it also is not clear from what Durandus has said that no such alternative proposal could succeed.

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secondary causes. To expand on an example he used, the senses reveal not only that fire produces the quality of heat in water, but also that heated water itself conserves this quality after the fire has ceased (MD XXII.1, ¶8, 1:804). Yet if the water were a secondary cause in Durandus’s sense, namely, one that produces its effects immediately by itself, then it could not be the case that God immediately conserves the heat in the absence of the fire. It therefore would not be the case, contrary to what Durandus claimed, that God immediately conserves all beings in existence.28 There may be a way around this objection that draws on the distinction in Thomas between causes secundum fieri and secundum esse (see §1.1.2). Durandus suggests the strong view that God cannot be in any way an immediate cause of the effects of secondary causes. But we could perhaps modify this view to say only that God cannot be the immediate cause both secundum fieri and secundum esse of such an effect. This modification would allow for the position that God is the sole cause secundum esse of an effect that secondary causes produce as its sole causes secundum fieri. Thus, for instance, God alone would be the cause of the esse of forms educed from matter, whereas secondary causes alone would be the cause of the educing of forms with that esse. This proposal would clearly seem to allow for conservationism given that Thomas had introduced the distinction between the two causes in the first place to defend the thesis that all creatures need to be kept in existence by God (ST I.104.1). Durandus’s claim against Aquinas that the esse of a particular object is only conceptually distinct from the determinate form of its esse (see S II.1.5, ¶6, 1:130) perhaps requires that the secondary cause of the fieri of this determinate form also be the immediate cause of its esse. If so, he could not in the end allow for the division of causal labor in the production of the object that my modification of his view requires. But whether or not Durandus could accept it, there seems to be at least some conceptual room for the position that God as primary cause is responsible for what is actual in causal interactions, namely, the esse of both cause and effect, whereas secondary causes are responsible for changes in what is actual, namely, what Thomas called the fieri of the effect. If the fact that God alone is the cause secundum esse of all natural effects is compatible with the fact that secondary causes alone are causes secundum fieri of those same effects, we would seem to have a version of mere conservationism that sidesteps one of Suárez’s main objections to Durandus. More to the point, given the topic of this book, we may well have a version of this position that Descartes could accept. To determine whether Descartes could accept this sort of mere conservationism, however, we must settle the question of whether he even allowed that secondary causes can produce changes in objects and, if so, whether he held that such causes can produce these changes immediately and completely by themselves, without any assistance from God that goes beyond his creating and conserving activity as the cause secundum esse of the world. A positive answer to the first part of this question would reveal that he followed the vast majority of scholastics in rejecting occasionalism. A positive answer to the second part would indicate that he deviated from most scholastics, and in particular from

28. I borrow here from the discussion of this Suárezian objection to Durandus in Freddoso 1991, 566–69.

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Suárez, in accepting a form of Durandus’s mere conservationism. I will be concerned to address these issues in the course of the discussion in the following chapters of various aspects of Descartes’s theory of causation. Before turning to Descartes, though, I need to consider Suárez’s account of causality, since such an account is a particularly important part of the scholastic context of that theory.

1.2. SUÁREZ ON EFFICIENT CAUSES AND CONCURSUS Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputations includes a “mini treatise” on causality that spans disputations XII through XXVII and covers a total of 590 pages in the Vivès edition, or about a third of the total work. This treatise concerns the familiar quartet of Aristotelian causes—material, formal, efficient, and final.29 However, disputations XVII through XXII, which cover a total of 263 pages, or close to half of the treatise on causality, concern exclusively the case of efficient causes. This imbalance reflects Suárez’s conclusion at the start of his discussion of causation that “the whole definition of the cause is most properly suited to efficient [causes]” (MD XII.3, ¶3, 1:389*). Such a conclusion in fact provides a bridge from a traditional Aristotelian account of the four causes to Descartes’s restriction of explanations in natural philosophy to efficient causes.30 Moreover, we will discover that Suárez’s discussion of efficient causes is particularly relevant to Descartes’s theory of causation, since the former includes his treatment of the nature of God’s efficient causality in creation, conservation, and concurrence. Before turning to the particular features in Suárez that serve to link his account of causality to what we find in Descartes, however, I pause to consider Suárez’s general project in the Disputations of renovating scholastic metaphysics. I provide a sketch of the context of this project that, though very rough, hopefully serves to indicate the significance of Suárez’s contributions to scholastic metaphysics as well as the relevance of these contributions for Descartes’s views (§1.2.1). Then I take up the account of causality in the Disputations, beginning with a discussion of Suárez’s treatment of the four main Aristotelian causes that highlights his view that efficient causes have a special kind of priority (§1.2.2).31 Finally, I consider his account of the

29. Following an initial disputation, entitled De causis entis in communi, disputations XIII and XIV are devoted to material causes, disputations XV and XVI to formal causes, disputations XII to XXIV to final causes, and disputation XXV to exemplary causes (see note 31). The section on causation closes with disputation XXVI, concerning the relation between cause and effect, and disputation XXVII, concerning the relation of causes among themselves. 30. But see the discussion in §2.1.2 of the complications for this view in Descartes. 31. As indicated in note 29, Suárez also devotes a section of his treatise on causation to exemplary causes, which involve the influence of ideas in the production of an effect, a category of cause that, as he emphasizes, derives from the Platonic rather than the Aristotelian tradition (see MD XXV.1, ¶1, 1:899*). We can set aside this non-Aristotelian category of causes given Suárez’s own endorsement of the view of “those who deny that the exemplary cause constitutes a proper genus of cause, but who say that it pertains to the efficient cause” (MD XXV.2, ¶8, 1:913*). For a discussion of Suárez’s reasons for this endorsement, Carraud 2002, 150–52.

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distinctive sort of efficient causality exhibited in the three main divine contributions to causation in nature, namely, creation, conservation, and concurrence (§1.2.3). Drawing on views in Thomas that we have considered, Suárez not only denies that divine conservation is distinct in reality from God’s act of creation ex nihilo, but also concludes that in addition to creation and conservation God contributes a distinct “concursus” to the action of secondary causes.

1.2.1. Renovating Scholastic Metaphysics Suárez belonged to a metaphysical tradition that Stephen Menn has labeled “liberal Jesuit scholasticism” (Menn 1997).32 As with most labels, this one requires some explanation and qualification.33 An initial point is that though Iberian Jesuits were most prominent in this tradition, one of its main pioneers during the mid–sixteenth century, more than a generation before Suárez, was the Dominican Domingo de Soto.34 Soto is distinguished from his hard-line Thomistic contemporary Cajetan by his acceptance of the voluntarist axiom, deriving from the Paris Condemnation of 1277, that God can produce any creature in separation from any other creature really distinct from it.35 The significance of this departure from orthodox Thomism is indicated by Descartes’s appeal in the course of his Sixth Meditation argument for mind–body distinctness to the principle that God can create separately what we can clearly and distinctly understand apart from each other (AT 7:78). What is “liberal” about the view of Soto and the later Jesuits is the way in which the voluntarist axiom that later appeared in Descartes led them to deny the more “conservative” view that the Aristotelian categories faithfully reflect real distinctions in being. For the hard-line Thomists, the category of substance and the nine categories of the predicamental accidents (viz., quantity, quality, relation, action, passion, time, place, position, and having) pick out non-overlapping kinds of really distinct res. In contrast, the liberal opponents of Thomistic orthodoxy held that the impossibility of conceiving of members of certain categories as existing apart from members of other categories reveals that the former are in fact not res really distinct from the latter.

32. Though I suggest some refinements of Menn’s characterization of this tradition, my remarks in this section are indebted to his exemplary discussion of it. For a general study of Suárez’s metaphysics, see also Courtine 1990. 33. Menn himself notes some concerns about his label in Menn 2000, 120. 34. Soto (1494–1560) influenced the work of such prominent Jesuits as Pedro da Fonseca (1528–99), Francisco de Toletus (1534–96), Luis de Molina (1535–1600), and the Spanish school of the Conimbricenses. 35. Though the axiom is not explicitly endorsed in the Condemnation, there is a repeated condemnation in this text of propositions that seek to limit divine power. Included are condemnations of purported implications of the teachings of Aquinas, such as the claim that God cannot multiply individuals of the same species without matter (see props. 42, 43, 110, and 116 in the reorganized and translated version of the Condemnation in Lerner and Mahdi 1995, 335–54). As indicated in Menn 1997, 229, Cajetan rejected the axiom and held that any anti-Thomistic elements of the Condemnation were revoked when Thomas was made a saint (in 1323).

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We can illustrate this difference in terms of what was, for the scholastics, the particularly problematic case of shape. On the Aristotelian view that the scholastics inherited, shape belongs to the fourth species of the category of quality, a category that itself is distinguished from the category of quantity.36 The “conservative” line of the Thomistae was that the mere distinction of these categories suffices to reveal that shape is a res distinct from quantity, even though not even God can create a shape apart from quantity.37 However, many Jesuit scholastics took the voluntarist axiom to show that shape cannot be a res distinct from quantity, and thus that it does not follow from the fact that shape and quantity belong to distinct categories that they are distinct beings. In denying that shape and quantity are distinct res, Suárez and other “liberal Jesuit scholastics” agreed with the view of the nominalists that derives from the work of the fourteenth-century scholastic William of Ockham. For the nominalists accepted both the voluntarist axiom and the claim that shape cannot exist apart from quantity. However, these thinkers also endorsed the Thomistic principle that the only alternative to a real distinction is one drawn “in reason,” and so concluded that shape is merely rationally distinct from quantity. Indeed, they radically reduced the number of distinct res in holding that only substance and its affective qualities (e.g., in material substances, sensible qualities such as colors, sweetness and bitterness, heat and cold) are distinct in this way. The nominalist conclusion is that the other predicamental accidents are merely rationally distinct from substance and its qualities. The Jesuit scholastics who followed Soto were concerned to provide a middle way between this sort of deflationary nominalism and the extreme form of realism in the work of the Thomists.38 So instead of speaking of their liberal scholasticism, perhaps it is better to refer to their metaphysical position as “moderate realism,” that is, a realism that accepts the limitations on distinctions in being that follow from the voluntarist axiom but that attempts to avoid the extremes of nominalism. To forge this middle way, the (primarily, though not exclusively) Jesuit moderate realist scholastics required metaphysical distinctions that stood between the real and rational distinctions that both Thomists and nominalists took to be exhaustive. Prior to Suárez, other scholastics had proposed various possibilities. In the fourteenth century, for instance, the Franciscan John Duns Scotus introduced intermediate formal and modal distinctions. Scotus embraced the principle that “things one of which can remain without the other are really distinct,” but also held that even inseparable items may differ sufficiently to be more than merely rationally distinct.39 Thus inseparable items that have different defining features are said to be “formally” distinct, whereas a certain qualification of a quality is said to be “modally” distinct from that quality. Though the

36. See Categories §8, 10a11–24, in Aristotle 1984, 1:16. The four species of quality are, first, habitus or dispositio, which assists the actualization of a potentia; second, potentia or impotentia (i.e., the privation of a potentia); third, the affective qualities; and fourth, shape or form. 37. Thus in a passage cited in Menn 1997, 243, n. 22, Cajetan offered the example of the relation of quantity to shape as a counterexample to the voluntarist axiom. 38. Though, as Suárez notes (MD VII.1, ¶9, 1:252–53), Soto was inconsistent on the question of whether there are intermediate distinctions between the real and the merely rational. 39. See the passage from Scotus cited in Menn 1997, 234, n. 13.

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human intellect and will are inseparable, they are formally distinct insofar as what it is to have an intellect differs from what it is to have a will, and vice versa. And though a particular degree of intensity of whiteness and the whiteness that has that degree of intensity are inseparable, the former is modally distinct from the whiteness insofar as it must be understood through the nature of whiteness, but not the nature of whiteness through it.40 The Scotistic notion of formal and modal distinctions reappeared in the work of later Iberian Jesuits such as Fonseca, who took them to be a means of accepting the voluntarist axiom without falling into the nominalist trap.41 According to Suárez, however, the Scotistic distinctions are unclear and in need of fundamental renovation. As a first move away from Scotus, Suárez insisted that one-way separability is not sufficient for a distinctio realis, that is, a distinction of res from res. What is required, rather, is mutual separability.42 Moreover, he held that where there is mutual inseparability, there can be only a distinctio rationis, that is, a distinction merely in reason and not in reality. In this case, there is simply a single res that is conceived in different ways. Finally, Suárez transformed Scotus’s modal distinction into a distinction of a res from a modus that cannot exist apart from it, though it can exist apart from the modus. In contrast to a distinction of reason, a modal distinction marks some distinction in reality, albeit not a distinction of res from res. Whereas those influenced by Scotus tended to hold that shape is formally distinct from quantity, Suárez claimed that the former is distinct in reality from the latter insofar as there is a modal distinction between the two.43 It is clear that Descartes had some knowledge of Suárez’s Disputations, since at one point in the Fourth Replies he appealed to a passage from this text in support of his conception of “material falsity” (AT 7:235).44 However, this one relatively minor point of contact hardly exhausts the influence of Suárez’s views on Descartes’s system. I have already indicated that the voluntarist axiom that was central to Suárez and other Jesuit moderate realists reappears in Descartes. Moreover, Suárez’s specific form of metaphysics is reflected in the theory of distinctions that Descartes offers in his Principles of Philosophy. For following Suárez, Descartes holds in this

40. For discussion of Scotus’s account of formal and modal distinctions, see King 2003, 22–26. 41. On Fonseca, see Menn 1997, 242–50. 42. Menn shows that Scotus’s more permissive criterion for a real distinction lands him in difficulties with respect to the transcendental relation of inherence. Given his view that an accident can exist (if only miraculously) without inherence, it follows that the accident and its inherence must be really distinct res. But since he was committed to the voluntarist axiom, Scotus must hold that the inherence can exist apart from the accident as well, and so without its inhering in the accident. By the same line of reasoning, however, the inherence’s inherence must be really distinct from that inherence, and we are on our way to an infinite regress (see Menn 1997, 234–35). In denying that one-way separability entails two-way separability, Suárez was able to avoid this regress. 43. For Suárez’s theory of distinctions, see MD VII, 1:250–74.44. 44. Descartes cited MD IX.2, ¶4, 1:322*, in defense of his remarks concerning material falsity in the Third Meditation, at AT 7:41. On material falsity in Descartes, see chapter 2, note 44.

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text that there is a threefold distinction tied to the separability of the objects being distinguished. Thus for Descartes, as for Suárez, two-way separability results in a distinctio realis, one-way separability in a distinctio modalis,45 and mutual inseparability in a distinctio rationis (PP I.60–62, AT 8-1:28–30).46 Further evidence of a Suárezian influence is provided in a 1643 letter to Mersenne, in which Descartes is concerned to deny the scholastic view that “there are any real qualities in nature, which are attached to substance, as little souls to their bodies, and which can be separated from it by divine power” (26 Apr. 1643, AT 3:649).47 Here Descartes has in mind the scholastic claim—common to Thomistic extreme realists, Jesuit moderate realists, and nominalists—that sensible qualities are really distinct from the material substances in which they inhere. In contrast to such a view, he insists that there is “no more reality either in motion, or in all these other variations of substance that one calls qualities, than the philosophers commonly attribute to shape, which they call not qualitatem realem, but only modum” (To Mersenne, 26 Apr. 1643, AT 3:648–49). But the “philosophers” who call shape a mode rather than a real quality are not the scholastics in general, or even the Jesuit moderate realists as a group, but Suárez in particular, who offered as an alternative to various other scholastic views the technical concept of mode and the accompanying theory of distinctions that Descartes incorporated into his metaphysics.48 Even if he recognized this connection to Suárez’s renovated metaphysics, which is perhaps questionable, Descartes did not draw attention to it. Nor did he acknowledge any specific debt to Suárez’s account of causation. But my brief consideration of the impact of Suárezian metaphysics on Descartes should warn us against taking his indifference to the details of this account to indicate its irrelevance for his concerns. Indeed, it will turn out that the Suárezian account is distinguished by claims concerning efficient causality and God’s causal contribution to natural interactions that are directly relevant to Descartes’s theory of causation.

45. There is admittedly a complication in this case given Descartes’s admission in the Principles that there can be a modal distinction between different modes of the same substance, even though such modes can exist apart from each other (PP I.61, AT 8-1:29–30). However, Descartes indicates that this case counts as a modal distinction only because both modes are inseparable from the same substance. He notes that in the case where the modes belong to really distinct substances, the distinction between them is more properly a real than a modal one (AT 8-1:30). Thanks to Eric Watkins for bringing this complication to my attention. 46. In the First Replies, Descartes follows the lead of his critic Caterus by invoking the view in Scotus that there is a formal distinction between any items that can be conceived through different concepts (AT 7:120–21; cf. First Objections, AT 7:100). Whereas he identifies formal and modal distinctions in this text, however, Descartes notes in the Principles that the formal distinction between thoughts of attributes that are only rationally distinct is itself a distinctio rationis, not modalis (PP I.62, AT 8-1:30). 47. I return to the (mis-)characterization of the scholastics as positing tiny souls attached to bodies in §2.1.2 (ii.b) and toward the end of §2.1.3 (ii). 48. For more on Suárez’s understanding of the Aristotelian categories and its relation to Descartes’s views, see the remarks in §1.3.

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1.2.2. The Priority of Efficient Causes Suárez begins his treatise on causation in the Disputations by addressing the question of whether there is any ratio common to all cases of causality. After considering and rejecting various suggestions drawn from Aristotle’s texts, he settles on the claim that “cause is a per se principle from which being flows into another” (causa est principum per se influens esse in aliud) (MD XII.2, ¶4, 1:384*). Practically every term in this sentence requires explanation. In saying that a cause is a principle, Suárez means to indicate that it is the thing that causes (res quae causat), as opposed to the causality itself (causalito ipsa) or the relation grounded in that causality (¶1, 1:384*). Thus, it is the heat in the fire that produces heat, rather than its production of heat or its relation to the heat it produces, that serves as the principle of this production. By holding that the principle is per se, Suárez means to exclude those things that are not res properly speaking or that are res but are linked merely per accidens to the cause of an effect. Thus, the fact that fire is not cold or the fact that it is yellow is linked only per accidens to its production of heat: in the first case, since the lack of cold is a privation and not a res at all, and in the second case, since the heat derives from the heat in the fire rather than from its color. Finally, the fact that the cause influit being into the effect indicates that it “communicates” or “gives” being to another (dandi vel communicandi esse alteri), a being of a sort that the cause itself somehow “contains” (¶4, 25:384*).49 Suárez admits, however, that this definition does not apply equally to all members of the Aristotelian quartet of material, formal, efficient, and final causes. The definition applies least well to the first two, which he called “intrinsic causes,” since such causes communicate being to “another” only in an attenuated sense. It is only in the case of the latter two, which he called “extrinsic causes,” that being is straightforwardly communicated to something external to the cause. However, even in the case of the latter the definition applies in the strictest sense only to efficient causes insofar as most final causes communicate being not directly by means of “an action,” but only indirectly by means of a “metaphorical motion.” 50 To fully understand these conclusions, we need to delve a bit into Suárez’s account of the metaphysics of causality.51 I consider first the case of material and formal causes, then efficient causes, which for Suárez provide the gold standard for causation, and finally the complicated case of final causes.

49. As I indicate in §2.1.3, Suárez holds that this being is contained in its cause “formally” when it is the same kind of being as what produces it and is contained in its cause “eminently” when what produces it is “more noble.” 50. As we will see in §1.2.2 (iii), however, Suárez makes an exception for God’s final causality, since he held that this causality produces its effects by an action and so is not distinguishable from God’s efficient causality. 51. For a more detailed consideration of Suárez’s account of the four causes that emphasizes the priority of efficient causality, see Carraud 2002, 145–63 (in a section appropriately titled “La reduction des causes à l’efficience”). There is a complementary discussion of Suárez’s account in Olivo 1997.

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(i) Material and Formal Causes Suárez’s account of intrinsic causes assumes the hylomorphic view basic to scholasticism, according to which the basic elements for composition of bodies are prime matter and various substantial and accidental forms. Prime matter is a material cause that is the recipient of change, whereas forms are formal causes that are the active principles of change. The distinction between substantial and accidental forms serves to distinguish the formal causes of the generation of composite material substances (viz., substantial forms) from the formal causes of accidental changes in such substances (viz., accidental forms). On these points, most scholastics were agreed. However, the details of Suárez’s account of material and formal causation were more controversial. For instance, orthodox Thomists held that matter, as pure potentiality, does not have any being of its own apart from form. Such scholastics therefore could not accept Suarez’s view that the material cause fits the definition of a cause that “inflows” its being into the effect. But Suárez insists that even though prime matter is merely potential, it has its own essence apart from form, namely, the essence of a potential recipient of change. It is this essence that matter contributes to the effect (MD XIII.4, ¶9, 1:411*).52 There is no similar dispute over the status of formal causality, since Suárez agrees with the Thomists that forms are principles of activity, and thus have their own being. Nevertheless, Suárez’s view is distinguished from that of earlier scholastics by his claim that a formal cause is not a cause in a full and proper sense, since it acts merely by means of “a formal and intrinsic union” with matter (MD XV.6, ¶7, 1:520). The “influx” of both the material and the formal cause thus involves merely an “internal composition” to which matter contributes the “mode of potentiality” and form the “mode of activity” (MD XII.3, ¶9, 1:391*). Suárez’s conclusion is that since such an influx is not precisely the same as the influx that occurs when a cause produces an effect external to and distinct from itself, material and formal causes can be called causes only “by analogy.” The analogy, in particular, is to the efficient cause, which “most properly inflows being” (MD XXVII.1, ¶10, 1:952*).53

(ii) Efficient Causes Suárez starts his discussion of efficient causality with a consideration of Aristotle’s definition of an efficient cause as that “whence there is a first beginning of change or rest.” He rejects this definition on various grounds, including the fact that it does not exclude material and formal causes, which in some sense also provide a principle for the beginning of change or rest, and the fact that it does not include divine creation, which does not involve a beginning of change or rest in an already existing

52. Here Suárez was under the influence of the Scotist position that prime matter is a res really distinct from substantial form. For discussion of this position, see Des Chene 1996, §5.1. 53. As we will discover in §2.1.2 (ii.a), Descartes also allowed for formal causes that are merely analogous to efficient causes, though his account of formal causality differs substantially from the account the account in Suárez that I have just considered.

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subject (MD XVII.1, ¶¶2–4, 1:581–82).54 The alternative definition he proposes is that an efficient cause is “a principle from which the effect flows forth, or on which it depends, by means of an action” ( principium a quo effectus profluit seu pendet per actionem) (¶6, 1:582). The definition of an efficient cause as that which involves a “flowing forth” of the effect may not seem to be less than entirely clear. Indeed, Leibniz complained in his preface to a 1670 edition of Nizolius’s On the True Principles of Philosophy (De veris principiis . . . philosophandi) that Suárez’s definition “is rather barbarous and obscure, . . . more obscure than what it defines: I would hope to define cause more easily than this term influxus taken so monstrously” (Leibniz 1978, 4:148). However, Suárez indicated that in a general sense influxus means simply “giving or communicating being to another” (dandi vel communicandi esse alteri) (MD XII.2, ¶4, 1:384*). Leibniz also had difficulties with the notions of giving or communicating being, most of which rested on the fact that he could not conceive of the literal transfer of some feature of the cause to the effect.55 Yet when Suárez speaks of the efficient cause as involving the flowing of an effect, he should not be understood to claim that a feature of the cause is literally transferred to the effect. His view in fact requires that an efficient cause is extrinsic for the very reason that it does not communicate “its own proper and (as I will put it) individual esse to the effect.” Rather, what occurs in the case of efficient causality is “some other [being] really flowing forth [profluens] and proceeding [manans] from [an efficient] cause by means of an action” (MD XVII.1, ¶6, 1:582). In either creating or educing an effect, an efficient cause produces an esse that is distinct from, though in some manner similar to,56 the esse that it possesses. Suárez claims that an efficient cause not only produces a new esse, but also produces it by means of an “action,” where this consists in “the emanation or dependence of an effect on its extrinsic cause, from which it receives being.” Suárez himself admits that this definition may seem to be uninformative, since it makes action “almost the same” as an efficient cause (MD XVII.1, ¶5, 1:582). In his view, however, the action is distinguished from the cause by the fact that the former constitutes the causality of the efficient cause, whereas the latter is the principle of that causality. Suárez follows other scholastic thinkers in taking the action to be something that resides in the patient rather than the agent.57 But drawing on his renovated form of scholastic metaphysics, he characterizes this action as a certain mode of the effect

54. For the point about creation, see §1.2.3 (i). 55. In 1696 comments on his “New System of Nature” (“Système nouveau de la nature”), for instance, Leibniz objected to “the way of influence” on the grounds that “we can conceive neither material particles nor immaterial qualities or species that can pass from one of these substances [viz., the soul and body] to the other” (Leibniz 1978, 4:499). For more on the background to Leibniz’s conception of “the way of influence,” or what he also called, following Suárez (see MD XVII.2, ¶6, 1:585), influxus physicus, see O’Neill 1993. 56. See note 49. 57. However, Suárez mentions Cajetan and Scotus as the main dissenters from this position; see MD XLVIII, ¶2, 2:888–89*.

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that the cause produces, namely, the mode of depending on that cause (MD XVIII.10, ¶8, 1:682).58 In identifying the action with the causality of the cause, Suárez offers— characteristically enough—a middle way between the views of Thomistic extreme realists and nominalists. On the one hand, he holds against the nominalists that an action is something distinct in reality from the agent, its power, and the effect in the patient. On the other, he holds against the Thomists that causality is not something over and above the action of an agent, but is identical to this action, which itself exists as a mode of the effect (MD XVIII.10, ¶5, 1:681). Suárez’s theory of action is complicated by the fact that he recognizes two different kinds of action that efficient causes can involve, namely, transeunt action, which “has an effect outside the agent itself,” and immanent action, which “has no effect outside the agent” (MD XLVIII.2, ¶1, 2:874*). I have noted above the case of the eduction of substantial or accidental forms from matter, which for Suárez is an example of transeunt efficient causation (i.e., efficient causation by means of a transeunt action). When the air causes the apple to become brown, the action is the dependence on the air that modifies the process in the apple of turning brown, whereas the terminus of the action is the qualified change involving the inherence of the accidental form of brownness. When worms cause the apple to decompose into its elements, the dependence on the worms that modifies the process of decomposition is the action, and the terminus of the action is the unqualified change involving the union of the matter of the apple with the new substantial forms of the elements. The case of transeunt efficient causation is best suited to the definition of a cause as that from which being flows forth into another. The case of immanent efficient causation (i.e., efficient causation by means of an immanent action) is more problematic insofar as the distinction of the effect from the cause is less clear. Since he accepted the Aristotelian principle that motion (in the broad sense of any change) requires an external mover in the case of material objects (see MD XVIII.7, ¶37, 1:642), Suárez claims that the primary examples of immanent efficient causation are changes that pure intellect or will causes in an intellectual (i.e., angelic) or rational (i.e., human) soul. In the case of the cognitive acts of pure intellect, however, Suárez notes that the effect is an “intelligible species” that is really distinct from the faculty that produces this species. Here he is simply following the Thomistic position that intellectual cognition involves the impressing of this species by the “agent intellect” in the “passive intellect.” 59 This way of saving the distinction of the effect from the cause is not available in the case of the will, given Suárez’s position that no distinct

58. But see the discussion in Hattab 2003 of the dissenting view in the work of the early modern scholastic Charles François d’Abra de Raconis that the causality of the efficient cause is distinct from its action in the patient. 59. For more on this Thomistic view in Suárez, but also his disagreements with Thomas concerning the production of the intelligible species, see §4.2.1. Suárez notes that though there is no species involved in the angelic contemplation of its own substance, still its substance as the object of the intellectual act can be distinguished from that substance as the principle of that act (MD XVIII.7, ¶48, 1:646).

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species are involved in this case. Nevertheless, Suárez insists that there is a distinction in the will between a “first act” involving the power of producing a certain immanent effect, on the one hand, and the “second act” consisting in the immanent effect, on the other. In producing a desire, the will in first act merely has the power to produce the quality of desiring an object, whereas the exercise of that power results in the second act of the inherence of that quality in the will (¶51, 1:647). Since desire is itself a real quality, and so really distinct from the power of the will that produces it,60 its production involves the flowing of being into something distinct from the volitional power that serves as the principle of this effect. In giving priority to efficient causes over material and formal causes, Suárez follows the view of the medieval philosopher Avicenna that the requirement that the effect be in some way distinct from the cause is central to the notion of causality.61 What is distinct, in particular, is the esse of the effect that “flows forth” from the cause. However, in claiming that an efficient cause produces the esse of its effect, Suárez need not hold that it is a cause secundum esse as Thomas understood this notion. For recall the view in Thomas that a cause secundum esse brings about not only the presence of its effect, but also the fact that the effect has the nature that it does (see §1.1.2). There is no suggestion in Suárez that it is essential for something to be an efficient cause that it bring about the latter. What is essential is only that the cause produce some being, whether with the assistance of other causes (as in the case of all actions of secondary efficient causes, which depend on God’s “concursus”) or entirely by itself (as in the case of divine creation and conservation).62 Before turning to Suárez’s views concerning secondary efficient causality and its relation to God’s causal activity, however, we need to complete our summary of his account of causation by considering his complex attitude toward what for Descartes, at least, is the most problematic of the four kinds of Aristotelian causality, namely, the causality of final causes.

(iii) Final Causes According to Suárez, final causes are the second of the two kinds of extrinsic causes. Thus, as in the case of efficient causes, the general notion of causality (“the principle from which being flows into another”) fits final causes better than material or formal causes. Indeed, at the start of his discussion of final causes in the Disputations, Suárez even claims, in apparent conflict with his main thesis of the priority of efficient

60. Desire belongs to the third species of the predicamental category of quality, whereas the volitional power that produces it belongs to the second species of that category; see note 36. 61. As indicated in Gilson 1986, Suárez also followed Avicenna and Peter of Auvergne (†c.1310) in combining efficient causes with “motive” causes that thinkers such as Aquinas had distinguished from them. It is because he held that the divine creation of being and the production of motion/change by secondary causes both involve an inflowing of being into an effect that Suárez was able to treat both as instances of efficient causality. 62. In §1.2.3 (i), I discuss Suárez’s comments on the passage from the Summa Theologiae that concerns the secundum fieri/secundum esse distinction.

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causes, that of the four main causes, final causes “are in some manner the most principal of all, and also the first” (MD XXIII.1, 1:843*).63 His reasoning here is that since even the action of an efficient cause is directed toward a terminus as its end, efficient causality involves the causal efficacy of an end, and thus final causality (¶7, 1:845*). However, Suárez admits that “the reason of the causing of [the final cause] is more obscure” than in the case of the other three kinds of cause (1:843*). This obscurity is due to the fact that there are very different kinds of causality depending on whether the action involves (a) “an uncreated intellectual agent, which is God alone,” (b) “created intellectual agents, among which humans are best known to us,” or (c) “agents that are natural, or lacking intellect” (¶7, 1:845*). What supports Suárez’s thesis of the priority of efficient causes is both the fact that final causality in case (b) involves not genuine action but only “metaphysical motion,” and the fact that when case (c) is considered in abstraction from God’s causal contribution, there is no genuine final causality at all. It is only in case (a) where the final cause produces its effect through an action, and in this case only because there is no real distinction between God’s final and efficient causality. Let us consider these three cases, starting with the case best known to us, namely, the one in which we as created intellectual agents act as final causes. (b) As with other created intellectual agents, final causality enters into only the immanent actions of our will. Earlier we noted the distinction in Suárez’s account of such action between the first act involving the power to produce an internal effect and the second act identified with the attainment of this effect. The ends of action that we cognize are final causes insofar as they incline the will in first act to pursue these ends as opposed to others. The “motion” associated with this inclination is merely “metaphorical” insofar as we do not actually pursue the particular ends toward which we are inclined in first act.64 The pursuit is actual, and thus the ends are efficacious, only when our will produces by means of an immanent action the desire for or love of those ends. Thus, even though the cognized ends as final causes are “in some manner the most principal” and “the first” insofar as they incline the will to act in a particular manner, it is the will itself rather than these ends that is the efficient cause that directly produces the relevant second acts. The insistence on the merely metaphorical nature of the motion involved in the first act is particularly important for Suárez in the case of our free actions, since he was deeply committed to the position that such actions do not derive necessarily from our will in first act.65 In his view, this first act can be free, and thereby elicit a second act that is free, only if it is “an active faculty that has control over its own action in such a way that it has within its power to exercise that act and not to

63. In this subsection I am following the helpful treatment of Suárez’s views on final causality in Carraud 2002, 152–61. See also the more general discussion of the relevant scholastic background in Des Chene 1996, ch. 6. 64. Suárez cites Aristotle (On Generation and Corruption I.7, 324b14–15, Aristotle 1984, 1:530) and Thomas (ST I-II.1.1) as sources for his account of metaphorical motion. See also the development of this notion in texts from Scotus cited in Carraud 2002, 158, n.1. 65. I return to this position in Suárez in §1.2.3 (ii) and then again in §5.1.1.

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exercise it and, consequently, to elicit one action or another—that is, opposite— action” (MD XIX.2, ¶18, 1:698). Suárez identifies this lack of determination to a particular action with the “indifference” of the free active faculty of will. He further distinguishes two kinds of indifference, namely, indifference with respect to the exercise of an act, which is required for our freedom to act or not to act, and indifference with respect to the specification of an act, which is required for our freedom to elicit one action as opposed to other contrary actions (MD XIX.4, ¶9, 1:708–9). Given these kinds of indifference, the cognized end cannot be said to produce in the will an actual motion (in the broad Aristotelian sense of a change) that, if unimpeded, necessarily terminates in a particular second act. Rather, it merely entices the will to freely produce this act, that is to say, it serves only as a final and not as an efficient cause of that effect.66 (c) I have noted the passage from the 1643 letter to Mersenne in which Descartes caricatures the scholastics as holding that bodies have real qualities attached to them as little souls (AT 3:649). Around the same time, in the Sixth Replies, he reports that in his youth he was under the sway of the scholastic view that the free fall of bodies is explained by the fact that they possessed the real quality of heaviness (gravitas), one that “carried bodies toward the center of the earth as if it had some knowledge of the center within itself” (AT 7:442). In effect, the proposal here is that the final causality of heaviness is to be understood on the model of the scholastic account of the final causality of created intelligent agents. For just as Suárez takes such agents to be directed by cognized ends to act in a particular manner, so the real quality of heaviness is supposed to be directed by its cognition of the center of the earth to carry the body to which it is attached to that location. The suggestion in Aristotle is that final causality is not restricted to cases involving cognition, but rather derives in general from the forms of composite substances, including those substances that lack intellect.67 However, Suárez is concerned to deny that any natural being—that is, any being that does not act by means of will— can be a final cause at all. This is clear from his claim in the Disputations that in the case of “those actions, that are from natural agents, there is properly no final causality, but only an inclination toward a certain terminus” (MD XVIII.10, ¶6, 1:887). Even when created intellectual agents act by some means other than will, according to Suárez, they are merely natural agents, and so are not true final causes (MD XXIII.3, ¶18, 1:857*). The finality of the actions of natural agents thus cannot be explained by appeal to the nature of these agents alone, who serve merely as efficient causes. Rather, Suárez claims that “there is final causality in them only as they are

66. Whereas Suárez holds that there is no volitional act, in this life, at least, toward which we are not indifferent with respect to exercise, he allowed that we are not indifferent with respect to specification toward volitional acts directed to ends proposed under the concept of a universal good. In the case of such acts, Suárez’s conclusion is that we perform them voluntarily but not freely; see MD XIX.8, 1:726–32. There is a further discussion of Suárez’s views on these points in §5.1.1 (i) and 5.2.1. 67. In MD XXIII.10, ¶2, 1:886*, Suárez cites as the source of this view Aristotle’s discussion in Physics II.7–8, 198a14–199b30 (Aristotle 1984, 1:338–40).

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from God, as in God’s other external and transeunt actions” (MD XXIII.10, ¶6, 1:887*). Thus, natural agents are directed to their ends by God, whose action is directed by his cognition of these ends. We have here one reason for Suárez to conclude that divine action is involved in the action of all natural agents. Such a conclusion is reinforced by his concurrentist position that God acts by means of the action of all secondary causes (see §1.2.3 (ii)). (a) We have noted the position in Suárez that the final causality of created intellectual agents involves a metaphorical motion of the will. However, he holds that since the one uncreated intellectual agent is purely actual, and thus has no potentiality, this agent, namely, God, can in no way possess metaphorical motion (MD XXIII.9, ¶6, 1:883*). Indeed, Suárez denies that there is any final causality internal to God himself. Though God does love himself or others for the sake of his own goodness, his attribute of goodness is not a final cause of this love. Rather, it is “only the reason (as it is said) of the divine will” (rationem tantun (ut dixi) voluntatis divinae) ( ¶6, 1:883*). Final causality is involved only when God acts as a transeunt efficient cause, and thus produces effects by means of an action external to him (¶12, 1:885*). However, there is no real distinction here between God’s final and efficient causality insofar as “the final causality of God with respect to external effects consists in this, that God produces the external effect by the intuition and love of his goodness.” Thus “one and the same operation . . . pertains to God whether by reason of efficacy or by reason of end, since it is related to God both as omnipotent and as the greatest good” (¶9, 1:884). The view here that God’s production of external effects involves both final and efficient causality is reflected even in Descartes, who despite his disdain for appeals to divine final causes (see §2.1.2 (ii.b)), nonetheless told a correspondent that all creatures can be said to exist for God’s sake insofar as “it is God alone who is the final cause as well as the efficient cause of the universe” (To Chanut, 6 June 1647, AT 5:54). As in the case of Descartes, however, Suárez’s discussion of God’s causal contribution to the world emphasizes more the relation to his power as efficient cause than the relation to his goodness as final cause. Thus, in the section of the treatise on causality in the Disputations that concerns efficient causes, disputations XX through XXII are devoted to God’s activity as primary efficient cause in creation, conservation, and concurrence. There Suárez takes the first two kinds of activity to be intimately related, as shown by his thesis that divine conservation is not distinct in reality from God’s act of creation, but is merely the continuation of that act. However, he insists against critics such as Durandus that there is a divine concurrence that involves a “concursus” that is distinct from God’s act of creation and conservation. I have indicated that these claims are an essential part of the “causal compatibilism” that Thomas proposed several centuries prior to Suárez. However, Suárez moved beyond Thomas in explicating these claims in terms of a comprehensive theory of efficient causality.

1.2.3. Creation, Conservation, and Concursus (i) Creation and Conservation Suárez’s discussion in disputation XX opens with the stipulation that creation involves the production of an entity ex nihilo. Since prior to this action there is nothing on which

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to act, creation must be distinguished from more mundane examples of efficient causation that involve a change produced by action on an existing subject. Thus, creation differs from the eduction either of an accidental form from a material substance, as in the case of accidental change, or of a substantial form from prime matter, as in the case of substantival generation (MD XX.1, ¶1, 1:745). In both of these cases, the efficient causality involves a change in a patient, whereas in the case of creation, there is no such change, since it is the existence of the patient itself that is produced. Nevertheless, Suárez insists that creation can be placed in the same category with the efficient causation of accidental and substantival change, since they all fit his definition of efficient causation, namely, the flowing forth of being into another by means of an action. The difference is merely that whereas change presupposes the existence of the patient that receives the new esse, creation does not. Moreover, in creation as well as in the other cases of efficient causation, the action is a mode of the effect, and thus is something that is only modally and not really distinct from that effect. In particular, this action is the dependence on the cause that modifies the effect that is produced.68 Suárez is concerned to distinguish creation ex nihilo from creation de novo, or creation in time. He does defend the claim that creation ex nihilo is compatible with creation de novo against the objection that what is created must be eternal insofar as the divine act of creation is eternal. He responds by appealing to his position, mentioned previously, that an action is in the patient rather than the agent. His conclusion is that reason is perfectly consistent with the dictate of faith that an eternal God created the world with a starting point in time (MD XX.5, ¶¶5–10, 1:780–82). However, Suárez also holds that God could have created the world ab aeterno, and thus could have created a world that is eternal in the sense of having no beginning in time. Creation “out of nothing” thus could signify not that there was a point at which the creature did not exist, but only that the creature would not have existed were it not for the fact that from eternity esse had been communicated to it from another (¶¶11–12, 1:782). Suárez claims that since neither matter (and the material forms educed from matter) nor finite immaterial entities exist a se, that is, from their own nature, they can exist in the first place only because they have being from an efficient cause that does exist a se, namely, God (MD XX.1, ¶¶15–21, 1:783–85).69 Divine creation would be necessary whether or not these entities were eternal. Suárez accepts the traditional conclusion that God alone can create a being ex nihilo. But though most scholastics followed Thomas in holding that natural reason can demonstrate this conclusion, Durandus argued against Thomas that there is nothing in the notion of creation as such that precludes a creature from creating

68. See MD XX.4, 1:769–79. In this section, Suárez offers this position as an alternative both to the Thomist position that the dependence of the creature on the Creator is a res distinct from that creature, since such a dependence belongs to the category of relation, and the nominalist position that this dependence is only distinct in reason from the creature. His position is thus perfectly in line with his renovated metaphysics (see §1.2.1). 69. Suárez notes that even though the material substances are generated out of matter rather than directly created by God, still they depend on divine creation insofar as the matter out of which they are generated must be created (MD XX.1, ¶22, 1:751).

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(S II.1, 4, 1:129–30*, responding to ST I.45.5). Suárez claims that there are more constraints on creation than Durandus allows. He concedes to Thomas, for instance, that only something with infinite power could have the unlimited ability to create any being whatsoever. Furthermore, Suárez’s concurrentist position that God must concur in all creaturely action (see §1.2.3 (ii)) precludes the possibility of any cause other than God creating without any divine assistance. Even so, Suárez notes that it still seems possible that creatures could have a more limited power to create with the help of God’s concursus (MD XX.2, ¶39, 1:764, also responding to ST I.45.5). He grants that we can know by faith that God has not in fact created any being that has the power to create. He also argues that since something with the perfection of being able to create would have added to the overall perfection of the universe if it existed, and since if it were possible God would have created this thing for that reason, the fact that no such thing exists provides grounds for thinking that no such thing is possible. Suárez concludes, however, that though the conclusion of this argument is certain for those who accept the tenets of faith, it is not evident on the basis of natural reason alone (¶12, 1:755–56). However it is established, the conclusion that God alone can produce creatures ex nihilo falls short of the thesis that creatures depend on God for the continuation of their existence subsequent to their creation ab aeterno or de novo. Suárez argues for this additional thesis in disputation XXI, where he claims not only that the continuation of the existence of creatures depends on God’s efficient causality, but also that this continuation depends on the very same act by which God created them in the first place. In arguing for the former point, Suárez starts with the thesis—drawn from the Thomistic distinction between causes secundum fieri and secundum esse—that when “an effect that depends on its cause directly and per se and primarily with respect to its esse, it depends on that cause not only in becoming [ fieri] but also in being conserved [conservandi]” (MD XXI.1, ¶6, 1:787). He notes that Thomas himself explained the distinction between being a cause of fieri and being a cause of esse “somewhat obscurely” (¶8, 1:787). The obscurity here seems to derive from the fact that even a cause secundum fieri is a source of the esse of its effect, and so is not clearly distinct from the cause secundum esse. However, Suárez proposes that an effect is from a cause secundum fieri insofar as “it does not absolutely and unconditionally require that cause to exist, but instead requires it only to exist through the action or production in question.” In contrast, the effect is from a cause secundum esse insofar as “it absolutely and unconditionally requires that cause in order to exist” (¶8, 1:787). Thus, Adam is a cause of Abel only secundum fieri insofar as Abel does not absolutely require Adam to exist; God could have created Abel without any causal input from Adam. In contrast, the cause secundum esse of Abel must be such that Abel could not exist without the activity of that cause (¶8, 1:787). Though offered as an analysis of Thomas’s distinction between causes secundum fieri and secundum esse, Suárez’s alternative definitions differ in at least one important respect from those that Thomas offered. Thus, whereas Thomas’s own example of the sun suggests that he allowed for causes secundum esse other than God, Suárez emphasizes that given his definition God alone can be such a cause. For since God can produce any effect by himself that he produces with secondary causes, God alone can be

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absolutely and unconditionally required for the effect.70 Given this strong requirement for being a cause secundum esse, it is perhaps clearer in Suárez than in Thomas why an effect depends on such a cause not only at the first moment of its existence, but also at every moment it exists. For it follows from this requirement that the existence of the effect, at whatever time it exists, depends absolutely and unconditionally on its cause secundum esse. Thus, insofar as creatures must be created by God to exist in the first place, they must also depend on God for their continued existence. Suárez’s second point above is that God conserves creatures by means of the same act by which he created them. Drawing again on Thomas’s discussion of the secundum fieri/secundum esse distinction, Suárez claims that there is no more justification for saying that God conserves by means of an act distinct from creation than that the sun continues to propagate light by means of an act distinct from that by which it first produced the light (MD XXI.2, ¶3, 1:791). In the case of the sun, the difference between production and propagation is merely that the term for the former connotes the prior absence of the light, whereas the latter connotes the prior presence of that light. The difference here is only a difference in which one and the same act is described, and so is a mere distinctio rationis, and not a distinction in reality. Likewise, in the case of God the difference between creation and conservation consists in the fact that the term for the former connotes the denial of a previously possessed esse, whereas the term for the latter connotes the prior possession of esse. Here again, the difference is in the words used to describe the action rather than in the action itself. In my discussion in §1.1.3, I noted the objection in Suárez that since there can be secondary conserving causes, a mere conservationist such as Durandus has no good reason to hold that God must conserve all beings in existence. What requires explanation here is how Suárez himself conceived of the relation between conserving secondary causes and divine conservation. In the case of secondary causes he distinguishes between the per accidens conservation that involves the removal of an impediment to continued existence, as when an angel conserves a human being by turning away a rock, and the per se conservation that involves the contribution of something needed for continued existence, as when the sun conserves life by giving light. However, even the latter sort of conservation is distinct from divine conservation insofar as it is merely “remote and mediate,” whereas divine conservation is “direct and immediate.” The contrast here derives from the fact that divine conservation alone involves “the persistent influx of that very esse that was communicated through production” (MD XXI.3, ¶2, 1:794). In line with my remarks toward the end of §1.1.3, however, I would simply note the possibility of a mere conservationist position according to which God alone is the direct and immediate per se conserving cause of objects, but secondary causes act alone as per accidens or per se remote and mediate conserving causes of those objects.

70. For the relevance of this difference between Thomas and Suárez to Descartes’s understanding of the Thomistic distinction between causes secundum fieri and secundum esse, see §2.2.1, at note 65.

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(ii) Concursus and Secondary Causes At the start of disputation XXII, Suárez observes that “of the concursus of the primary cause with secondary [causes] as regards their actions, one finds that little is said by Aristotle and other philosophers” (MD XXII, 1:802). His conclusion in this section that God as primary cause concurs per se and immediately in all actions of secondary causes of course recalls the thesis of Thomas’s causal compatibilism that God operates in all operations in nature. However, Suárez does not follow Thomas in equating secondary causes with instrumental ones. Moreover, he offers an alternative to an account of God’s concursus with free human action in the work of some followers of Thomas that appeals to the relation of agents to instrumental causes. Though Suárez’s account of divine concurrence clearly is indebted to Thomas, it also differs on important points of detail from the views of Thomas and later Thomists.71 We have seen that Thomas’s defense of causal compatibilism relies on the analogy to instrumental causality. God’s action with creatures is compared to an agent’s use of an instrument. In both cases, there is a single effect that two subordinated agents produce by the same action. However, we have also seen the objection in Durandus that secondary causes are not mere instruments when they elicit their effects by means of a power that is proportioned to those effects. Thus, even though a pen does not have the power to produce words unless moved by an agent, it seems that fire has the power to heat on its own. Insofar as the fire has such a power, there would be no need to appeal to another principle of the effects of this power in God. Suárez discusses various scholastic attempts to respond to this line of objection by distinguishing instrumental causes from “principal” efficient causes (MD XVII.2, ¶¶7–19, 1:585–91). Most notable is Scotus’s proposal (considered in ¶¶10–12, 1:587–88) that instrumental causes merely dispose a patient to receive a form from the principal efficient cause. Scotus insisted that though even secondary principal causes must be subordinated to God, the subordination in this case differs from the subordination of an instrumental cause to a principal cause. For whereas the subordinated instrumental cause does not produce the ultimate effect, the subordinated principal cause is enabled to produce this effect by the activity of the primary cause.72 Suárez rejects Scotus’s proposal on the grounds that some instrumental causes produce the ultimate effects directly, as when certain accidents immediately educe a substantial form (MD XVII.2, ¶11, 1:588).73 However, he shares Scotus’s view that the

71. Suárez’s theory of divine concursus is, however, close to the position that his fellow Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina offered in his 1588 Concordia, the full title of which is Liberi arbitrii cum gratiæ donis, divina præscientia, providential, prædestinatione et reprobatione Concordia (The Compatibility of Free Will with the Gifts of Grace, Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination and Reprobation). For a comparison of the views in Molina and Suárez, see Perler and Rudolph 2000, 201–13. As we will see in chapter 5, the theory of “middle knowledge” that Molina offered in his Concordia is an important part of the scholastic context of Descartes’s discussions of human freedom. 72. For further discussion of Scotus’s proposal and Suárez’s response, see Menn 2000, 131–33. 73. Suárez also provides as an example the immediate effecting of an intelligible species by a phantasm. As I indicate in §4.2.1, however, this example is problematic for him.

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subordination of a secondary cause to God need not be the same as the sort of subordination involved in instrumental causality. To capture the difference between these two kinds of subordination, he offers the view that an instrumental cause is one that “concurs in, or is elevated to, the production of something more noble than itself, that is, something beyond the measure of its own proper perfection and action” (MD XVII.2, ¶17, 590). In the case of a secondary principal cause, the effect is not more noble than itself, and thus its subordination to God does not result in the conclusion that it is a mere divine instrument. Nonetheless, Suárez insists that this cause is subordinated to God, since it can produce the effect proportionate to it only with the help of the divine concursus. Durandus’s question, of course, is why this further assistance is needed given that the effect is proportionate to the secondary cause. The answer in Suárez, broached in §1.1.3, is that the effect has an esse that requires God’s immediate and per se causality as much for its production as for its conservation. However, it might be possible to develop further the response on behalf of the mere conservationist that I offered earlier. We have considered the distinction in Suárez’s metaphysics between a res and a modus of that res (see §1.2.1). Though there is some distinction in reality here between a mode and its res, the esse of the mode is not independent of the esse of the res, but is a mere determination of the latter. Thus, it could perhaps be said that God produces the esse of a mode just insofar as he creates and conserves the esse of the res that mode modifies. And such a claim seems to leave open the possibility that secondary causes alone produce modifications in an already-existing res. Of course, Suárez would protest that secondary causes can produce substantial and accidental forms that are not mere modes but res distinct from matter. But for someone, like Descartes, who rejected such qualities (see §1.3), a version of mere conservationism that allows for such a possibility would appear to be a live option.74 As we know, however, Durandus concluded not only that his mere conservationism is an acceptable position, but also that Thomas’s causal compatibilism is an unacceptable alternative. One of his main arguments for this conclusion is that since God must produce the effect of a secondary cause by means of an action that differs from that cause, either God’s action produces the entire effect, thus rendering the action of the secondary cause superfluous, or brings about only part of the effect, in which case the action of the secondary cause produces the other part without divine assistance. This dilemma is possible given Durandus’s claim that God cannot produce an effect by means of the same action as that of the secondary cause, since “it is impossible for numerically the same action to be from two or more agents in such a way that it is immediately and completely from each, unless numerically the same power is in them” (S II.1.5, ¶12, 1:131). However, Suárez simply endorses the Thomistic line, considered above, that even though the same action cannot derive entirely from two different causes of the same order, it does not follow that it cannot so derive from causes in dif-

74. Cf. Philip Quinn’s suggestion on Durandus’s behalf, as reported in Freddoso 1991, 583, n.26, that God is a per se and immediate conserver just of substances and not of accidents (see also Quinn 1988). Freddoso objects to this suggestion on the grounds that “no fullbodied naturalist will dispute the claim that secondary causes are capable of effecting substances as well as accidents” (Freddoso 1991, 583, n.26). As I indicate in §1.3, however, Descartes at least is not a full-bodied naturalist.

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ferent causal orders. Following the development of the Thomistic position in Scotus, Suárez claims that these causes are compatible in the case where one is essentially subordinated to the other. Given that the activity of secondary efficient causes is subordinated to God’s activity as primary cause, a single action in the patient can derive from causes of both kinds (MD XXII.3, ¶4, 1:826–27, citing ST I.105.5, ad 2). Suárez’s identification here of the actions of secondary causes with God’s concursus with those actions reveals one important difference between divine concurrence and conservation. We have noted the view in Suárez that God’s per se and immediate conservation of an object at different times occurs by means of the same action, which itself is merely the continuation of his act of creating that object. In contrast, Suárez emphasizes the distinctness of the acts by which God concurs with secondary causes. Thus, he argues that since “the concursus external to God is nothing other than the action itself ” by which the secondary cause acts, “the concursus will vary according to the variety of the actions” (MD XXII.4, ¶8, 1:831). Whereas God immediately conserves an object at different times by means of the same act, then, he must concur by distinct acts in the different operations of that object. In one sense, we should expect Suárez to distinguish concurrence from conservation. After all, he is concerned to set himself apart from the mere conservationist who holds that divine creation/conservation exhausts God’s contribution to secondary causality. However, it will be important in the context of a later consideration of Descartes’s own views concerning God’s activity as primary cause to remember this implication in Suárez that divine concurrence involves a kind of inconstancy in the effect that is not present in the case of divine conservation. There is one final objection to concurrentism in Durandus that we have not yet considered. In his Sentences, Durandus appealed at one point to his mere conservationist position in support of the conclusion that though God is the “universal and primary cause” of our sinful actions, their “proximate and immediate cause” is not God but rather our free will (S II.38.1, ¶4, 1:192*, citing II.1.5, 1:130–31). Suárez is sensitive to this line of objection, offering as a reason to reject his concurrentism the claim that in the case of sinful free action, “it is unseemly to attribute such actions to the primary cause insofar as it is operating per se and immediately” (MD XXII.1, ¶5, 1:803). Suárez’s response to this claim depends on his account of the difference between God’s concursus with “necessary” or “natural” causes, on the one hand, and his concursus with “free” causes, on the other. Necessary causes are such that, all the conditions for action being posited, the action itself follows necessarily (MD XIX.1, ¶1, 1:688). God’s concursus with a necessary secondary cause is determined to a particular effect. Whereas Suárez claims that all natural and nonrational beings are necessary causes, he holds that there are rational volitional agents that are free causes in the sense that they are not determined to a particular action even when all the conditions for acting have been posited (MD XIX.2, ¶11, 1:696). As I have mentioned, his view is that free agents are immanent causes that in “first act” are indifferent with respect to which “second acts” to elicit (see §1.2.2 (iii)). Suárez holds that though there is a divine concursus identical to the second act that the free agent in fact elicits, the conditions for action include God’s offer of a concursus with refraining from eliciting the second act or with eliciting other second acts, and so the agent is able either to refrain from acting (and so has “freedom of exercise”) or to act differently (and so has “freedom of specification”) (MD XXII.4,

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¶21, 1:834). Since God does not offer only one concursus in the case of free sinful action, he does not determine the agent to that action, and so it is the agent rather than God who is responsible for the sin.75 As I indicate in chapter 5, Suárez’s view that indifference is an essential element of human freedom was standard among the Jesuits but also a source of controversy in the early modern period. We also will discover in that chapter that this controversy is an important part of the context for Descartes’s various discussions of human freedom and divine providence. However, there is a further feature of Suárez’s account of free human action that is connected to his worries mentioned previously concerning the appeal to the case of instrumental causation in an explanation of the relation of God’s activity as primary cause to the activity of secondary causes. As Suárez notes, certain sixteenth-century Thomists cited Thomas’s claim that God uses secondary causes as his instruments in support of the conclusion that God concurs with free human agents by means of a “physical premotion.” Just as the craftsman produces an effect by applying a tool in a particular manner, so God concurs in a free action by “premoving” the will to act in a certain way (MD XXII.2, ¶11, 1:813). However, Suárez claims that Thomas in fact favored the less problematic position that God’s concursus with free human action is simultaneous with that action, and indeed is identical to it (¶¶16 and 49–50, 1:814 and 823–24). We need not enter here into the dispute over the interpretation of Thomas.76 What is more relevant to our concerns is Suárez’s conclusion that his theory of “simultaneous concurrence” (as it came to be called) avoids certain difficulties that confront the Thomistic theory of physical premotion.77 One crucial difficulty is that any physical predetermination through premotion precludes genuine human freedom. For in Suárez’s view, such freedom requires that the will be indifferent to an action even given the presence of all of the prerequisites for that action. But if the predetermination to a particular action is part of the set of prerequisites, then the will cannot be indifferent to that action, and so not be free in eliciting that action (¶39, 1:821).78 Suárez admits that his theory of human freedom has implications for an interrelated set of theological

75. For further discussion of Suárez’s account of divine concurrence in the case of sinful free human action, see Freddoso 2001. 76. Suárez’s admitted that certain remarks in On the Power of God support the interpretation of Thomas offered by the Thomistae, but claimed that the relevant discussion in the Summa Theologiae does not (MD XXII.2, ¶52, 1:824). 77. For an indication that these were the standard labels, see the 1704 Use of Reason and Faith (Usage de la raison et de la foi) of the French Cartesian Pierre-Sylvain Regis (or Régis) (1632–1707), which includes a chapter on the dispute over divine concours between defenders of la prémotion Physique and le (now, la) concours Simultanée (I-2.32, Regis 1996, 383–87). The labels for these positions give the misleading impression, which Suárez in fact encourages, that the Thomists understood the divine moving of the human will to be temporally prior to the act of that will. In fact, they held that the priority is one of nature and not time, and they allowed that the premotion occurs at the very instant that the will acts. The difference from Suárez consists simply in the fact that they distinguished this instantaneous premoving from the act of the will. 78. A typical Thomist response is that the divine predetermination is not to be included in the set of prerequisites, since these include only what is required on the part of other secondary causes. There is a sympathetic discussion of this response in Osborne 2006.

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issues concerning divine providence, foreknowledge, predestination, and grace, but notes that his main concern is to address the philosophical question of how God’s activity as primary cause is related to the activity of free human agents (¶41, 1:821). Though Descartes was notoriously reticent to become entangled in theological disputes, he was forced to confront this philosophical question. We will consider his response to it as the last stage of our treatment of his theory of causation.

1.3. FROM SUÁREZ TO DESCARTES Suárez inherited the traditional Aristotelian distinction among material, formal, efficient, and final causes. However, I have noted the view in Suárez that efficient causes best reflect the definition of a cause as that which serves as “a per se principle from which being flows into another” (see §1.2.2). Though we do not find in Descartes this (or, indeed, any other) formal definition of cause, the focus on efficient causality is reflected in his remarks on causal explanation. Thus, in the Principles of Philosophy he claims that in explaining natural events in terms of “God or nature,” we should consider God “as the efficient cause of all things” (PP I.28, AT 8-1:16). Admittedly, Descartes is rejecting here explanations in terms of God’s final causality that he found in the scholastics, and that we have seen in Suárez (see §1.2.2 (iii); cf. §2.1.2 (ii.b)). However, even in Suárez there is a decided emphasis on God’s causal contribution as an efficient cause in his creation and conservation of the world and in his concursus with the action of secondary causes (see §1.2.3). In presenting Suárez as preparing the way for Descartes, I certainly do not mean to deny that they offered efficient causal explanations that differ in fundamental respects. After all, Descartes himself insists on the importance of the fact that his causal explanations of the material world do away with the sort of theoretical entities found in scholastic explanations. Thus, in speaking of the schoolmen he challenges a correspondent to “compare all their real qualities, their substantial forms, their elements and countless other such things with my single assumption that all bodies are composed of parts” (To Morin, 13 July 1638, AT 2:200). On the scholastic view in Suárez, prime matter and substantial forms are distinct res that compose material substance, whereas accidental forms are res distinct from the material composite that inhere in it.79 In contrast, Descartes proposes that matter is nothing more than divisible res extensa, and that bodily accidents are not res but rather modes of the parts that compose matter.80 While Descartes’s conception of a mode is drawn

79. An exception here is the case of the accidental form of quantity, which Suárez, in opposition to a more orthodox Thomistic position, takes to inhere in prime matter directly rather than in the composite. In §3.1.2 (i), I indicate that the Suárezian account of quantity is in important respects closer than the Thomistic account to Descartes’s view of matter. 80. I am assuming here that Descartes takes the parts that serve as the subjects of the modes to be substantial. Cf. the alternative view, cited in chapter 2, note 9, that he is committed to the conclusion that the only material substance is the whole of res extensa, and that the parts of this substance are modes rather than substances.

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from Suárez (see §1.2.1), his view that all bodily accidents are merely modal features of res extensa most assuredly is not.81 The differences here make a difference with respect to the particular accounts of efficient causality in the material world that Suárez and Descartes offer. Though Suárez posited the substantial form as a formal cause of a material substance (see §1.2.2 (i)), he also held in the section of the Metaphysical Disputation on efficient causality that such a form is required as an efficient cause of certain changes in nature. The causal role of the substantial form is particularly important in the case of substantival generation. Suárez shared with Thomas the view that such generation involves the eduction of a substantial form that is contained in the potentiality of matter (see §1.1.2). Suárez further insisted that the efficient causality of accidental forms is insufficient to account for this eduction, since a substantial form is “more noble” than an accidental form, and since the “principal cause” 82 of an effect “must be either more noble than, or at least no less noble than, the effect” (MD XVIII.2, ¶2, 1:599).83 We will discover that Descartes accepts a version of the axiom from Suárez that a cause must be at least as noble as the effect (see §2.1). Given his parsimonious ontology, however, Descartes could not accept the argument in Suárez that such an axiom requires the postulation of substantial forms as efficient causes of substantival generation. Indeed, Descartes rejects substantial forms on the basis of the fact that there can be no natural generation of a substantial res. As he put the point in correspondence with Regius, “[I]t is inconceivable that a substance should come into existence without being created de novo by God” (Jan. 1642, AT 3:505). Of course, Suárez would insist that a secondary cause cannot produce a new substance without the help of divine concursus. Moreover, he could protest that the eduction of a substantial form does not amount to the creation of a substance insofar as a substance naturally subsists on its own, whereas a substantial form naturally composes a substance. Even so, Suárez’s metaphysical scheme requires that substantial forms are res distinct from matter, and thus that in producing such a form, the secondary cause produces a being that can, at least miraculously, subsist on its own apart from matter (see §1.2.1). For Descartes, this result is unacceptable, since any being that can subsist on its own, even if only by God’s absolute power, is itself a substance.84 The dispute here is not simply

81. For a further consideration of Descartes’s various arguments against substantial forms and real qualities, see Rozemond 1998, ch. 4. 82. As opposed to an instrumental cause; see §1.2.3 (ii). 83. Suárez also appealed to the efficient causality of the substantial form in explaining the production of accidents that immediately derive from that form by means of a “natural emanation.” Thus, the substantial form of water is the efficient cause of the accident of coldness that naturally emanates from it. It is due to such an emanation that heated water will, when removed from the source of heat, reduce itself to its natural state of being cold (see MD XVIII.3, ¶4, 1:616). For more on the scholastic conception of substantial form, see the discussion in Pasnau 2004. Pasnau documents the increasing emphasis in later scholastic thought on the efficient cause role of substantial forms. 84. In his argument for mind–body distinctness in the Sixth Meditation, Descartes emphasizes that “the question of what kind of power is required” to produce the separate existence

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over the use of the term ‘substance’. Rather, the real question is whether something that can be educed from the potentiality of matter is in fact a res distinct from matter. And when Descartes says in his letter to Regius that forms that merely “emerge from the potentiality of matter . . . should not be regarded as substances” (AT 3:505), he can be seen as making the defensible point that something that is a res distinct from matter cannot be contained in the potentiality of matter. For Descartes, what can be educed from matter as res extensa is only local motion and, consequently upon that, different sizes and shapes.85 Since res extensa is itself a substance, it is something that only God can create. In rejecting any res in matter distinct from divinely created res extensa, Descartes rejects as well the accidental forms that Suárez took to be res distinct from composite material substance that serve as efficient causes of natural accidental change. However, Suárez had a complex theory of the efficient causality of accidental forms that raises additional questions regarding Descartes’s conception of causation. Suárez’s theory starts from Aristotle’s list of predicamental accidents, which, as we saw in §1.2.1, distinguishes quantity, quality, relation, action, passion, time, place, position, and having.86 Of these categories, Suárez held that only qualities, and neither quantity nor relation nor the six minor accidents, can be principles of action. Among the qualities, principles of action include active (as opposed to merely passive) potentiae, habits and dispositions that yield specific actions (as opposed to general states), and sensible qualities. Among the sensible qualities, some such as colors can produce “intentional species” of themselves but not qualities similar to themselves, whereas others such as heat and light can produce both intentional species of themselves and qualities similar to themselves. Suárez in fact explicitly denied that either shapes (in the category of quality)87 or local motions (as well as alteration in quality, augmentation in quantity, and substantial generation) can serve as per se principles of action (see MD XVIII.4, 1:624–27). In Suárez’s view, then, Descartes’s claim in the Principles that his consideration of the material world “involves absolutely nothing apart from these divisions [in quantity], shapes and motions” (PP II.64, AT 8-1:79) requires the denial that anything in matter can serve as a principle of efficient causality. He therefore would take Descartes’s radical alternative to the scholastic ontology of the material world to lead

of two objects does not affect the claim that they are really distinct (AT 7:78). For a discussion of the relation of this view to that of the scholastics, see Rozemond 1998, 130–33. 85. Descartes claims in the Principles that “any variation in matter or diversity of its many forms depends on motion” (PP II.23, AT 8-1:52–53). For him, the “forms” intrinsic to the parts of matter can involve only modes of extension such as size and shape. 86. In his Disputations, Suárez devotes the following disputations to each of the categories: XL–XLI to quantity, XLII–XLVI to quality, XLVII to relation, XLVIII to action, XLIX to passion, L to time, LI to place, LII to position, and LIII to habit. 87. On Suárez’s view that shape is a mode of quantity rather than a res distinct from it, see §1.2.1. As indicated in that section, this Suárezian view is reflected in Descartes’s characterization of the scholastic position.

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back to some form of occasionalism, at least with respect to the explanation of purely material change. Whether Descartes would accept this implication of his ontology of the material world is a question we will address in due course. Even if Descartes were committed to some form of occasionalism in the case of body–body interactions, however, it would be a mistake to see medieval Islamic occasionalism, rather than scholastic anti-occasionalism, as providing the proper context for a consideration of the account of causation in his physics. For one thing, Islamic occasionalism simply was not a live option during Descartes’s time in the way in which scholastic antioccasionalist accounts of bodily causation were. Moreover, Descartes’s rejection of the scholastic ontology of the material world did not prevent him from adopting certain general features of the account of causation that we find in Suárez. I have already mentioned his endorsement of a version of the axiom in Suárez that a cause must be at least as noble as the effect. Given this endorsement, Descartes could not have been sympathetic to the view in Islamic occasionalism, which Hume later accepts, that causal correlations can hold between any two distinct events.88 But as will become evident in what follows, it is also the case that Descartes’s view of God’s causal activity draws on claims in Suárez concerning the relation between divine creation and conservation. I will be concerned to argue that this connection to Suárez provides a reason to reject the view of those who take Descartes’s theory of causation to include a form of temporal atomism that is similar to that of the Islamic occasionalists (see §2.2). This connection to Suárez is significant for Descartes’s theory of causation given the fact, which I emphasize in chapter 3, that his account of divine conservation is a central element of the metaphysical foundations that he provides for his anti-scholastic physics. The importance of the anti-occasionalist scholastic context is not restricted to Descartes’s account of causation in physics. In addition to the general metaphysical principles in the work of the scholastics that I have emphasized in this chapter, there are further specific claims concerning causation in Suárez and other scholastics that we must consider if we are to understand what Descartes has to say about forms of causation other than body–body interaction. In what follows, I note in particular the relevance of such claims for Descartes’s account of the action of body on mind (see §4.2.1) and of the action of mind on body (§4.3.1). The scholastic context will allow us to appreciate certain problems in Descartes for mind–body interaction that go beyond the problem of the interaction of objects with differing natures that has tended to dominate recent discussions of his theory of causation. Moreover, it will become clear in the final chapter that this context is essential for an adequate understanding of the sort of causation that Descartes takes to be involved in the free acts of our will.

88. For this view in Ghaza-lı-’s Incoherence, see §1.1.1. For a discussion of the relation of Ghaza-lı-’s position to Hume’s account of causation, see Nadler 1996. My view that Descartes differed from the Humean line on this point has been disputed in Della Rocca (forthcoming). According to Della Rocca, Descartes does not take the causal axiom he inherited from the scholastics to show that causes explain their effects. I defend my different reading of Descartes’s axiom in §2.1.3.

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Admittedly, as in the case of physics, so Descartes’s accounts of mind–body interaction and free human action presuppose a basic ontological framework that differs, sometimes radically, from a traditional scholastic framework. However, these undeniably important differences should not blind us to the extent to which the problems concerning causation that Descartes confronts, and even aspects of his responses to those problems, were bequeathed to him by his scholastic predecessors.

2

Two Causal Axioms

In contrast to Suárez, Descartes did not bequeath to posterity an extended treatise on the nature of causality. Nevertheless, his remarks on causation in the Third Meditation provide a natural starting point for a consideration of his theory of causation. For in this text, Descartes emphasizes two conclusions regarding causation that he took to be evident. The first, which is central to the main proof in the Third Meditation of the existence of God, is that “there must be as much in the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause” (AT 7:40). This is alternatively expressed by the claim that the effect “cannot begin to exist unless it is produced by something in which there is formally or eminently all that is found” in the effect (AT 7:41). Elsewhere Descartes labels this as the “axiom or common notion” that “whatever there is of reality or perfection in some thing, is formally or eminently in its first and adequate cause” (AT 7:165). Drawing on this label, as well as the claim in this passage that the reality or perfection is contained in the cause, I call this constraint on causation the “containment axiom.” 1 In addition to this axiom, there is Descartes’s argument toward the end of the Third Meditation that since “conservation differs solely in reason from creation,” there must be “some cause that as it were creates me at this moment, that is, conserves me” (AT 7:49). Descartes also expresses this claim as the axiom that

1. In contrast to the English-language secondary literature on this topic (see note 7), Descartes typically speaks of causal axioms or notions rather than of causal principles. But he does indicate in correspondence that the term ‘principle’ can be used for “a common notion that is so clear and so general that it can serve as a principle for proving the existence of all the beings, or entities, to be discovered later,” as well as for “a Being, the existence of which is better known to us than any other, so that it can serve as a principle for knowing them” (To Clerselier, June/July 1646, AT 4:444).

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“no less a cause is required to conserve a thing than to produce it at first” (AT 7:165). I call this additional constraint on causation the “conservation axiom.” Both of these axioms have a clear scholastic precedent in Suárez. Indeed, there is a suspicion among some commentators that the containment axiom, in particular, is merely a scholastic holdover that has no real justification in Descartes’s system. For instance, Jonathan Bennett has concluded that “after decades of intermittently brooding” over this axiom, the axiom itself is “without value” and “seems not to reflect any deeply considered views about the nature of causation” (Bennett 2001, 1:89).2 As we will discover, however, other commentators have insisted that this axiom is significant for Descartes insofar as it precludes the causal interaction of objects with natures that he takes to be heterogeneous, most notably the interaction of mind as res cogitans and body as res extensa.3 There is less disagreement in the literature over the value of Descartes’s conservation axiom. However, there is an interpretation of this axiom that distances it from its scholastic counterpart. Here again Bennett illustrates the point, claiming that the conservation axiom leads Descartes to the position that “the continual preservation of things through time . . . is really the continual creation of successors to them” (Bennett 2001, 1:98). This claim of course reflects the earlier interpretation of Descartes’s view of divine conservation, mentioned in the introduction, that Norman Smith offered in 1902.4 But this interpretation is perhaps developed most completely in the later work of Martial Gueroult.5 What neither Gueroult nor Smith nor Bennett emphasizes, however, is that a re-creationalist account of the conservation axiom conflicts with the view in Suárez and other scholastics that conservation requires not distinct acts of recreation, but merely the continuation of the very same act by which God created in the first place. A different view of the metaphysics of Descartes’s two causal axioms emerges, however, once we take seriously their source in scholastic thought. The scholastic context not only allows us to understand the import the containment axiom had for Descartes, but also reveals that this axiom does not create the sort of difficulties for mind–body interaction that critics have tended to emphasize. Moreover, Suárez’s version of the conservation axiom in fact provides a basis for rejecting the claim that Descartes identified the conservation of the world with its continual re-creation. I noted in §1.3 that Descartes offers a radical alternative to the sort of scholastic ontology that underlies Suárez’s account of causality. But this departure from scholasticism turns out to be

2. Bennett calls the containment axiom the “causal resources principle.” For further discussion of Bennett’s treatment of the issue of causation in philosophers from Descartes to Hume, see my review of Bennett 2001 in Schmaltz 2002b. 3. See the views of Radner discussed below. See also the comments in the introduction concerning the so-called scandal of Cartesian interaction. 4. However, Bennett himself cites in defense of his re-creationalist interpretation of Descartes a passage from Smith 1952, 218. For more on this interpretation, see note 92. 5. Where Bennett goes beyond Gueroult is in attributing to Descartes the position that God does not conserve the very same object over time, but rather creates a series of nonidentical successors. I think that Bennett is correct in holding that this is an implication of the recreationist reading of conservation, at least on one account of identity, but I argue in §2.2.2 that such an implication reveals that this reading cannot reflect Descartes’s own views.

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compatible in the end with the dependence of Descartes’s understanding of the metaphysics of causation on the views of his scholastic predecessors. In §2.1, I begin my consideration of this account by focusing on Descartes’s containment axiom. My statement above that this axiom “expresses” the claim that the cause contains at least as much reality as its effect actually begs the question against the view in the literature that there are two distinct constraints on causation here. So I need to start by arguing that there is in fact only one axiom. Then I consider the significance of the fact that Descartes restricted his containment axiom to the “efficient and total cause” of an effect, as well as the precise meaning of the claim in this axiom that the effect is contained in the cause “formally or eminently.” Throughout it proves useful to take into account remarks in Suárez, who anticipated Descartes’s statement of the containment axiom and the technical terminology used therein. In §2.2, I turn to the conservation axiom as explicated in the Third Meditation. Descartes indicates there that this axiom follows from the “nature of time,” and that it yields the result that conservation is distinct only “in reason,” and not in reality, from creation. This result seems to be drawn straight from Suárez, though I have mentioned the claim in Bennett, anticipated in Gueroult, that for Descartes divine conservation consists in a series of discrete creative acts rather than, as Suárez would have it, in a continuation of God’s original creation of the world. But though there are some differences in the arguments for divine conservation in Suárez and Descartes, I understand both to agree that God conserves creatures by means of the continuation of the same act by which he created them ex nihilo. Even though the Suárezian context is essential for understanding Descartes’s containment and conservation axioms, I claim in §2.3 that these axioms do not take him the full way to Suárez’s own concurrentist position. The containment axiom leaves unresolved some basic issues concerning how an effect is actually produced. The conservation axiom goes further in revealing that divine conservation plays an essential background role in causal interactions. But there remains the metaphysical question— central to scholastic discussions of causality—of the precise nature of the creaturely contribution to causality in nature. To address Descartes’s stance on this issue, we must shift from a consideration of his abstract causal axioms to an exploration of the details of his accounts of various forms of causal interaction.

2.1. THE CONTAINMENT AXIOM The main topic of the Third Meditation is “the existence of God,” and in the course of offering his main proof there of God’s existence, Descartes appeals to the following as “manifest by the light of nature,” which I divide into two parts: [1] There must be at least as much in the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause. For I ask, where could the effect receive [assumere] its reality, unless from the cause? And how could the cause give this to it, unless it also has [this]. For thus it follows that something cannot come from nothing, nor that what is less perfect, that is, what contains more reality in itself, from what has less. . . . That is [Hoc est], [2] in no way can some stone, for example, which was not before, now begin to be, unless produced by another thing in which there is all either formally or eminently that is found in the stone; nor can heat that was not

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Both (1) and (2), as well as the view that they are intimately connected, are drawn straight from the scholastic tradition. For instance, in his Disputations Suárez proposes that especially in the case of efficient causality, the following principle holds, which I divide into corresponding parts: [1'] [A]n effect cannot exceed in perfection all of its causes taken together. It is proved that nothing of perfection is in the effect that it does not have from its cause; therefore [ergo] [2'] the effect can have nothing of perfection that does not pre-exist in any of its causes, either formally or eminently, because causes cannot give what they in no way contain. (MD XXVI.1, ¶2, 1:916*)

Suárez’s (1') requires that “all causes taken together” contain “everything of perfection” in their effect on the grounds that the effect can “have” its perfection only from these causes. Similarly, Descartes’s (1) requires that the “efficient and total cause” of an effect contain at least as much “reality” as its effect contains on the grounds that the effect must “receive” its reality from its cause. And just as Suárez’s (2') requires that the perfection of the effect “preexist” in all of its causes “formally or eminently,” so Descartes’s (2) requires that the total cause contain in this way “all” that is in its effect.6 One important difference derives from the indication in Descartes that his causal constraints apply not only to the “actual or formal” reality that an effect has from its cause, but also to the “objective reality” that his idea of that effect has. In the case of (2), in particular, the causal constraint is said to require that “the idea of heat, or of the stone, could not be in me unless it is placed there by some cause in which there is at minimum as much of reality as I conceive to be in heat or the stone” (AT 7:41). This extension of the causal constraint to the case of objective reality is of course central to the Third Meditation argument that God must exist as the cause of the objective reality of our idea of God. I will have more to say presently about Descartes’s views on objective reality in relation to the very different views on this type of reality in Suárez. But my main concern will be to address the following questions concerning the passage above from the Third Meditation. First, there is the question of whether the constraints introduced in (1) and (2) amount to the same or are distinct constraints. A second question concerns the import of Descartes’s restriction of the constraint in (1) to the “efficient and total cause.” Finally, there is the question of what precisely Descartes meant by the claim in (2), anticipated in Suárez, that a cause must contain its effect “formally or eminently.”

2.1.1. How Many Causal Constraints? Suárez links his two causal constraints by the term ergo, thus indicating that the fact that all perfections of an effect are contained formally or eminently in the total set 6. Whereas Descartes followed Suárez in holding that a cause need contain at least as much reality or perfection as its effect, the version of the containment principle in the work of Proclus and other Neoplatonists requires the stronger condition that the cause contain more reality or perfection than its effect. For a discussion of the Neoplatonic version of the principle, see Lloyd 1976.

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of its causes (2′) follows from the fact that such causes together contain at least as much perfection as is present in this effect (1′). Indeed, the suggestion in Suárez is that the two constraints come to the same thing. For a cause to contain at least as much perfection as its effect just is for it to contain formally or eminently everything in its effect. Suárez took formal and eminent containment to exhaust the ways in which perfection can be contained. This same view seems to be reflected in Descartes’s remarks in the Third Meditation. For by introducing (2) by the term Hoc est, he suggested that this constraint comes to the same as (1). Nevertheless, there is the view in the literature that Descartes’s (1) and (2) are distinct constraints insofar as (1) requires much less of the cause than does (2). For instance, Daisie Radner argues that whereas (1) explicates a relatively weak “reality principle,” which requires the containment in the cause of only at least as much reality as is found in the effect, (2) introduces a stronger “containment principle,” which requires further the containment in the cause formally or eminently of the specific features of the effect (Radner 1985a, 41).7 When pressed to explain the sort of “reality” that he had in mind in asserting (1), Descartes explains that “substance is a greater thing than mode,” and that “if there is an infinite and independent substance, it is a greater thing than finite and dependent [substance]” (AT 7:185).8 What is suggested here is the following simple ontological hierarchy: God

infinite substance

minds bodies9

finite substances

thoughts shapes/sizes/motions

modes of finite substances10

7. I take the labels from the discussion of Radner’s position in O’Neill 1987, 231–32. Radner calls the reality principle the “at least as much principle,” and the containment principle the “pre-existence principle.” O’Neill is inclined to Radner’s view that Descartes offered two distinct causal constraints; see O’Neill 1987, 232. Radner also takes Descartes to offer a distinct “communication” principle on which the cause literally transfers to the effect what it contains in itself. In §3.2.1 (iii), I consider the claim in Broughton 1986 that Descartes was led by his views on causation to accept such a principle in the case of body–body interaction. 8. Descartes also includes in this hierarchy “real accidents, or incomplete substances” that “are greater things than modes, but less than complete substances” (AT 7:185). But he famously rejects the existence of scholastic bodily accidents that can (at least miraculously) subsist apart from corporeal substance. 9. There is some dispute in the literature over whether Descartes allowed that particular bodies are substances at all. On a view that Martial Gueroult defends, there is only one material substance, with particular bodies serving as modes; see Gueroult 1953, 1:107–18, and Gueroult 1968, 540–55. Cf. the recent development of this interpretation in Lennon 2007. However, Descartes himself speaks of the parts of corporeal substance as distinct substances (e.g., in PP I.60, AT 8-1:28–29), and he distinguishes between parts of a body and its modes (Sixth Replies, AT 7:433–34), thus suggesting that particular bodies are substantial parts of matter rather than modes of it. For an appeal to these considerations in response to Gueroult’s interpretation, see Hoffman 1986, 347–49. 10. In a letter to Arnauld, Descartes emphasizes that one must distinguish between thought or extension insofar as it constitutes the nature of a substance and the variable

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In terms of this hierarchy, the claim that a cause must have as much reality as its effect requires only that the cause be on at least the same level of the ontological hierarchy as its effect. This seems to fall short of the requirement that the cause contain everything in the effect formally or eminently. According to Radner, the requirement here is that the cause possess not merely the general type of reality in the effect, but the specific nature of the effect itself.11 In response to Radner, however, Louis Loeb denies the distinction between the two principles Radner claims to find in Descartes on the grounds that what is said to be contained formally or eminently in the cause is simply the perfection or reality that the reality principle concerns. In Loeb’s view, to say that the cause must contain formally or eminently everything in the effect is just to say that the cause must contain something on either the same ontological level as its effect (in the case of formal containment) or a higher ontological level than its effect (in the case of eminent containment). Thus, the containment principle requires not that the cause “contain modes of the same kind” as it produces in the effect but merely that it contain the reality of the effect “qua degree of perfection” (Loeb 1985, 228). According to Loeb, then, the containment principle requires that in the case of the production of a mode, say, bodily motion, the cause that formally contains this effect possess not motion itself, but only something on the same ontological level as this mode. Loeb’s claim that the two causal principles are not ultimately distinct may seem to be supported by the fact that when attempting to formalize his system in the Second Replies, Descartes offers only the one causal axiom, and explicates that axiom in terms of his simple ontological hierarchy. The causal axiom, which I cited at the outset, is that the “first and adequate” cause contains formally or eminently “whatever there is of reality or perfection in the effect.”12 But this axiom is followed by a further axiom that explains the notion of reality or perfection by appealing to the fact that “substance has more reality than accidents or modes, and infinite substance, than finite” (AT 7:165). So the suggestion here is that the reality that the cause formally or eminently contains is simply the reality of the effect as infinite substance, finite substance or mode.

modes of that attribute, such as particular acts of thinking or particular shapes, sizes, or motions (29 July 1648, AT 5:221). On his official view, the thought or extension that constitutes the nature of a substance is an invariable attribute that is only “distinct by reason” from that substance (see PP I.62, AT 8-1:30). This kind of attribute thus belongs on the same level of reality as the substances to which they are attributed. In §2.2.2, I note the view in Descartes that there is only a distinction of reason between a substance and its invariable attribute of duration. 11. As Radner puts the point, the further constraint on causation requires that in the case where the effect is a mode, the cause “communicates” this something that “pre-exists” in itself and that what gets communicated is not merely “just modality or modeness” but rather a particular kind of mode (Radner 1985a, 41). 12. I address presently the restriction of the axiom to the “adequate” or, what is the same for Descartes, “total” cause.

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Loeb’s deflationary version of the containment axiom suffices for the purposes of the main argument for the existence of God in the Third Meditation. As I have indicated, the central premise of this argument is that the cause must contain formally or eminently the reality that is present objectively in our idea of infinitely perfect substance.13 But to contain something at the same level of reality as infinitely perfect substance just is to contain formally infinite perfection itself. Nonetheless, a more robust sort of formal containment seems to be required for the proof of the existence of the material world in the Sixth Meditation. After ruling out the possibility that his mind has an “active faculty” ( facultas activa) that produces the objective reality of his sensory ideas, Descartes notes that there must be “another substance distinct from me, in which all the reality must inhere [inesse] either formally or eminently, which is objectively in the ideas produced by this faculty.” Either the substance is body, in which case the reality inheres formally, or it is God or “some creature more noble than [nobilier] body,” in which case the reality inheres eminently (AT 7:79). In terms of the simple ontological hierarchy, the claim that one created substance is more noble than another would seem to amount to the claim that the former is on a higher level in the hierarchy than the latter. But this claim is problematic given the implication of the simple ontological hierarchy that all substances other than God are on the same ontological level. As I indicate in my discussion below of Descartes’s view of eminent containment, this consideration reveals the need for a revised version of his ontological hierarchy. However, the relevant point here is that the mere containment of something with the same amount of reality does not suffice for formal containment in the Sixth Meditation proof. For other finite minds do contain something with the same amount of reality as the bodily modes present objectively in our sensory ideas, namely, its own modes. But the proof makes clear that finite substances more noble than bodies contain the objective reality of the sensory features of bodies eminently rather than formally (AT 7:79). More needs to be said about the exact nature of the formal containment that Descartes has in mind here; we will return to this point presently. Yet even an initial consideration of the Sixth Meditation proof of the material world indicates that formal containment requires not merely that what is contained be on the same ontological level as the effect, but also that it have the same nature as the effect. So at a minimum, that which formally contains the objective reality of our sensory ideas of bodies must have the same nature as body. My proposal is that Descartes offers a single causal axiom that requires that the cause contain the reality of the effect formally or eminently. Any apparent distinction of causal constraints derives from the fact that he sometimes needed to consider the reality or perfection of the effect only abstractly in terms of his simple ontological hierarchy, as in the case of the Third Meditation proof of the existence of God,

13. I have more to say in §2.1.3 (i) about Descartes’s account of objective reality and of its distinction from formal reality.

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whereas at other times he needed to consider the reality or perfection as reflected in the particular nature of the effect, as in the case of the Sixth Meditation proof of the existence of the material world. In the end, there seems to be no difference between Descartes and Suárez on the relation between the two causal constraints. For both, the requirement that the (total or adequate efficient) cause contain at least as much perfection as its effect is to be understood in terms of the requirement that the (total or adequate efficient) cause contain everything it produces in the effect formally or eminently. To this point I have spoken only in general terms about the requirement in the containment axiom that the cause contain “formally or eminently” what is found in the effect. We will discover that the notions of formal and eminent containment are not entirely straightforward for Descartes. Before puzzling over the complications, however, we need to consider briefly the import of Descartes’s claim to Mersenne that when he said in the Third Meditation that there is nothing in the effect “not contained formally or eminently in its EFFICIENT and TOTAL cause,” “I added these two words on purpose” (AT 3:274). At least initially, total causes are most usefully contrasted with partial causes, and efficient causes with formal and final causes. The scholastic context, particularly as provided in Suárez’s work, turns out to be crucial for Descartes’s own understanding of these contrasts.

2.1.2. “EFFICIENT and TOTAL Cause” (i) Total/Adequate versus Partial Causes The “theologians and philosophers” gathered by Mersenne who wrote the Second Objections argue that since living things are produced by the sun, rain, and earth, which lack life and therefore are “less noble” than what they produce, it is the case, contrary to what Descartes claimed in the Third Meditation, that “an effect may derive from its cause some reality that is nevertheless not present in the cause” (AT 7:123). Descartes initially responds by insisting that life is a perfection that can be explained in terms of the operations of inanimate bodies. Here he appeals to his argument that it is only reason, particularly as manifested in language use, that cannot be so explained.14 Yet in his Second Replies, as well as in a related letter to Mersenne, Descartes also allows for the possibility that living organisms include perfections not present in the sun, rain, and earth, but concludes that if this is so, then it shows only that these elements are not the total or adequate causes of what they generate.15 Descartes nowhere provided an analysis of total or adequate causes, or indicated the sense in which objects such as the sun, rain, and earth could be causes without being total or adequate causes. Yet at one point in the Third Meditation he does refer to the possibility that several “partial causes” (causes partiales) contribute to his cre-

14. This is the argument in DM V, AT 6:55–59. 15. Cf. AT 7:134, in which Descartes denies that they are adequate causes, and AT 3:274, in which he denies that they are total causes.

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ation (AT 7:50). Moreover, there is in Suárez an analysis of the distinction between total and partial causes. In the Disputations, he defines the total cause as that “which provides the whole concursus necessary for the effect in its order,” and the partial cause as that “which per se alone does not contribute a sufficient and wholly necessary concursus” (MD XXVI.3, ¶1, 1:925–96*).16 In failing to contribute a sufficient concursus, partial causes may seem to be similar to instrumental causes that, in his view, must be subordinated to and act with other causes of the same order to produce effects more noble than themselves (see §1.2.3 (ii)). Suárez cautions that though partial causes also must act with other causes of their same order to produce their effects, they are not subordinated to those other causes, and so are principal rather than instrumental causes (MD XVII.2, ¶18, 1:591). However, his claim that partial causes require assistance from other causes of the same order allows him to hold that secondary causes can be total causes of their effects even though they can produce these effects only with the help of the concursus of the primary cause. In terms of this analysis, Descartes could say that the sun, rain, and earth are not total or adequate efficient causes of living organisms because they do not provide everything needed in the order of secondary efficient causes to produce their effect. The concursus of other organisms or, in the case of the original production of the organism, of other kinds of bodies are required for this production. Since they are only partial causes, the sun, rain, and earth need not contain formally or eminently everything present in the organisms they produce.17 But given his containment axiom, Descartes must hold that the total efficient cause of the organisms, consisting of these partial causes together with the other organisms or bodies that contribute to their production, must so contain the effect. And on this point Descartes agrees with Suárez, who asserts as certain that “the effect cannot exceed in perfection all of its causes taken together.” For Suárez, as for Descartes, such a certainty reveals that “the effect can have nothing of perfection that does not pre-exist in some of its causes, either formally or eminently” (MD XXVI.1, ¶2, 1:916*). There is, however, one interesting complication for the view that Descartes can accept the conclusion in Suárez that creatures as well as God can be the total cause of an effect. This complication derives from the so-called Conversation with Burman, a record of a 1648 interview that Descartes had in his country retreat in Egmont with the Dutch theological student Frans Burman. One portion of this conversation concerned Descartes’s claim in the Third Meditation that given the fact that God has created him “there is a strong reason to believe that I have been made in

16. Suárez further distinguishes partial causes, which are principal causes that bring about effects with other causes of the same kind and order, from instrumental causes, which are not principal causes, since they bring about effects with other secondary causes of a higher order to which they are subordinated; see MD XVII.2, ¶¶16–19, 1:590–91. For more on his view of instrumental causes, see §1.2.3 (ii). Here I focus on his account of principal causes. 17. Elsewhere, Descartes refers to the sun as a “universal” cause of its effects that requires the contribution of other “particular” causes; see To Elisabeth, 6 Oct. 1645, AT 4:314. In §2.2.1, I discuss Descartes’s view in this letter that the action of the sun as a universal cause must be distinguished from God’s action as “universal and total cause” of all effects.

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some way in his image and likeness [imaginem et similtudinem], and that I perceive that likeness, which includes the idea of God, by the same faculty that enables me to perceive myself” (AT 7:51).18 Burman objects to this claim that “surely God could create you, and yet not create you in his own image.” Descartes is reported to respond, after citing the principle that “the effect is similar to the cause,” that since “God is my cause, I am His effect,” it follows directly that “I am similar to him.” When Burman rejoins that the builder who produces a house is not similar to it, Descartes notes that the fact that the builder “only applies activity to the passive” shows that “the work as a work is not itself similar.” He then claims that in the contrasting case of “the total cause and [the cause] of being itself,” which “produces something else ex nihilo (which is the mode of production that pertains to God alone),” the effect must be similar to the cause. Thus since the total cause of being is itself “being and substance,” it follows that what it produces “must at a minimum be being and substance, and so in any case be similar to God and bear His image [imaginem]” (AT 5:156). If ‘the total cause and the cause of being itself’ means “the total cause, that is, the cause of being itself,” then only God could be a total cause given the remark to Burman that the mode of producing being itself ex nihilo belongs to God alone.19 On this reading, the containment axiom could apply only to God. However, one could read ‘the total cause and the cause of being itself’ as referring to something that is the total cause and in addition the cause of being itself. The response to Burman may be that a thoroughgoing similarity of effect to cause can be derived only in the case of a total cause of that effect that is also the cause of the being of that effect.20 In the cases of total causes that bring about their effects by applying their activity to passivity, one cannot argue to a similarity in being, since such causes do not produce the being of the patient, but merely alter a patient that already has its own being. To be sure, Descartes must take the alteration to be contained in its total cause formally or eminently. Yet one cannot assume that the being of what is altered must be similar to the being of what alters it. The builder must (eminently) contain the plan of the house he will build, but the passive materials to which he applies his activity need not be similar to himself. We will return in §2.2.1 to the question of whether God’s total causality of the world precludes any other sort of causal input. But at least the argument in the Burman report that the similarity between cause and effect is required only in the case of the cause of being itself does not require the restriction of total causality to God alone.21

18. Also at issue is Descartes’s claim in the Fifth Replies that “divine [creation] is closer to natural production than to artificial [production]” (AT 7:373). 19. Cf. Descartes’s remarks at AT 7:111. But see also the discussion in §1.2.3 (i) of reservations in Suárez of demonstrating on the basis of natural reason alone the conclusion that God alone can create ex nihilo. 20. I overlooked the possibility of this alternative reading in my analysis of the Burman passage in Schmaltz 2000. 21. There is a similar reading of the Burman passage in Pessin 2003, 43. Cf. the discussion of this passage in §2.2.1.

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(ii) Efficient versus Formal and Final Causes Previously we have considered the view in Suárez that since form and matter are intrinsic causes, they differ in kind from two kinds of extrinsic causes, namely, “final causes” that cause “by means of a metaphorical motion” insofar as they merely incline other causes, and efficient causes that are the true source of effects through an action (see §1.2.2). Though Suárez emphasized that efficient causality is the primary case of causation, he was also willing to appeal to material, formal, and final causality in his explanations of natural change. Descartes’s restriction of his containment axiom to efficient causality indicates this unwillingness to extend the notion of causality in a similar sort of way. Even so, he allows at times for something akin to formal causes, and he admits not only a rational teleology in the case of the actions of created minds, but also a kind of natural teleology in the case of the soul–body union.22 What we need to understand is how Descartes’s concessions are compatible with his emphasis on the exclusivity of efficient causality. Let us consider intrinsic formal causality first, then extrinsic final causality. (ii.a) Descartes admits a kind of formal causality analogous to though distinct from efficient causality in the course of commenting on his suggestion in the Third Meditation that God derives his existence from himself. The Dutch critic Johan de Kater, or Caterus, protested in the First Objections that God can derive his existence from himself only in a negative sense, or not from another, and not in a positive sense, or from a cause (AT 7:95). In response, Descartes insists that it is legitimate to assume that everything requires a cause of its existence, and to inquire into its efficient cause. He adds that even though the fact that God has “great and inexhaustible power” reveals that he does not require an external cause for his existence, still since “it is he himself who conserves himself, it does not seem too improper for him to be called sui causa” (AT 7:109). Since God can be called a sui causa, “we are permitted to think that he stands in the same relation to himself as an efficient cause does to its effect, and hence to be from himself positively” (AT 7:111). Dissatisfied with this explanation, Arnauld notes in the Fourth Objections that we are to understand the source of God’s existence not in terms of an efficient cause, but in terms of the fact that since his existence is identical to his essence, God requires no efficient cause. Arnauld adds that since nothing can stand in the same relation to itself as an efficient cause does to its effect, God cannot stand in this relation to himself (AT 7:213–14).23 Though Descartes protests that Arnauld’s complaint “seems to me to be the least of all his objections” (AT 7:235), he nonetheless responds to it at some length. He begins by insisting that he never said that God is an efficient cause of his own existence, but only that he in a sense stands in the same relation to his existence as an

22. I take the terms ‘rational teleology’ and ‘natural teleology’ from Simmons 2001. 23. Arnauld’s objection is relevant also to Descartes’s axiom in the Second Replies that “no thing exists of which it cannot be asked what is the cause why it exists” (AT 7:164). I discuss this axiom in §5.1.2.

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efficient cause does to its effect.24 To explain more precisely the sense in which God is the cause of his existence, Descartes appeals to the claim in Aristotle that the essence of a thing can be considered as a “formal cause” of certain features of that thing (AT 7:242). He concedes to Arnauld that the fact that God’s existence is identical to his essence reveals that it does not require an efficient cause, but he notes that God’s essence provides a formal cause of his existence that “has a great analogy to the efficient [cause], and thus can be called an efficient cause as it were [quasi causa efficiens]” (AT 7:243).25 Even though he emphasizes the analogy to efficient causality, Descartes also suggests that there must be some room in his ontology for a species of causation distinct from efficient causation. After all, Descartes tells Arnauld that there is between an efficient cause and no cause “the positive essence of a thing” (AT 7:239). To be sure, he continues by allowing that the concept of an efficient cause “can be extended to” the concept of a formal cause, in the same way that the concept of a rectilinear polygon can be extended to the concept of a circle (AT 7:239). But just as a rectilinear polygon remains something distinct in nature from a circle, so an efficient cause seems to remain something distinct in nature from a formal cause.26 In the exchange with Arnauld, the discussion of formal causality is limited for the most part to the special case of God’s existence. However, I have noted Descartes’s appeal to an understanding of formal causality in Aristotle that is not restricted in this manner. Descartes cites in particular Aristotle’s claim in Posterior Analytics that the defining form of a right angle is the cause of the fact that an angle in a semicircle is a right angle (II.11, 94a25–35, Aristotle 1984, 1:155). Given this citation, Descartes could extend the notion of formal causality to cover any case in which a feature of an object derives from that object’s nature or essence. Though he himself does not speak in these terms, he could say that the extension that constitutes the essence of a body is the formal cause of that body’s capacity to have certain kind of modes, in particular, modes of extension. Of course, this appeal could not explain why the body has certain modes rather than others. In contrast to the case of God’s existence, such an explanation would need to invoke the efficient causes of the bodily modes. But also in contrast to the case of God’s existence, an explanation of these modes in terms of their efficient causes seems to be perfectly compatible with an explanation of the ability of body to possess such modes in terms of the formal cause of the modes.

24. Descartes is not entirely innocent, though, since he does deny in the First Replies that he said that it is impossible for something to be the efficient cause of itself, and he suggests that efficient causes need not be either prior to or distinct from their effects (AT 7:108). It is understandable that Arnauld takes this text (to which he had access when composing his Fourth Objections) to indicate that Descartes wanted to apply the notion of efficient causality to the derivation of God’s existence from himself. 25. For a helpful discussion of Descartes’s exchange with Arnauld on this point, see Carraud 2002, 266–88. Carraud draws on the discussion of Descartes’s conception of God as causa sui in Marion 1996, 143–82. 26. Thus, there seems to me to be some reason to qualify Carraud’s conclusion that for Descartes “the expression ‘cause efficiente’ is henceforth redundant” (Carraud 2002, 179). Carraud cites the similar conclusion in Marion 1991, 286–87.

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Thus, there may be no reason for Descartes to dispute the consequence in Suárez that the fact that an effect has a total efficient cause does not preclude the fact that it also has a formal cause. Moreover, Descartes’s claim in the Fourth Replies that we conceive of formal causality in the case of God “by analogy with the notion of efficient causation” (AT 7:241) recalls the view in Suárez that formal causes can be called causes only by analogy to efficient causes (see §1.2.2 (i)). Nevertheless, it is clear that the account of formal causality that I derive from the remarks in the Fourth Replies differs fundamentally from the account of such causality in Suárez. Descartes’s official doctrine in the Principles is that there is only a distinctio rationis, and not any distinction in reality, between the “principal attribute” of extension and the corporeal substance whose nature it constitutes (see PP I.62, AT 8-1:30).27 According to Descartes, then, anything that inheres in matter can be only a mode of extension.28 Here he is of course concerned to reject the substantial and accidental forms that schoolmen such as Suárez took to be the source of formal causality in the case of material substances.29 But Descartes is committed to rejecting as well the view in Suárez that formal causality involves an “intrinsic and formal union” of a form that is distinct in re from that with which it unites. Descartes therefore could not take formal causality to enter into an account of the composition of corporeal substance; at most, he could appeal to this kind of causality merely to anchor bodily modes in the extension that constitutes the essence of body. But though a Suárezian account of the causal role of the forms of material composites cannot provide a model for Descartes’s conception of formal causality, such a model is provided by something in Suárez that we have not yet considered, namely, the “metaphysical form” that he identified with “the form of the whole, nothing other than the whole essence of the substantial thing” (MD XV.11, ¶3, 1:558). For if anything is a formal cause in a body, according to Descartes, it is the extension that constitutes the whole nature of that body. Yet Suárez himself denied that metaphysical forms are formal causes in the case of material objects insofar as they already include both the matter and form of such objects and thus do not issue in “actualizing some other subject” (MD XV.11, ¶7, 1:559). Given this scholastic context, it is understandable that Descartes felt no need to leave room in his physics for a kind of formal causality that differs from the efficient causality governed by the containment axiom. (ii.b) Descartes is famous for his rejection of appeals to God’s final causality. In the Fourth Meditation, he argues for such a rejection by claiming that since I now know that my own nature is weak and limited, whereas the nature of God is immense, incomprehensible and infinite, I also know without more ado that he is capable of countless things whose causes are beyond my knowledge.

27. Here Descartes is drawing on the theory of distinctions in Suárez. For a discussion of this theory, see §1.2.1. 28. In §3.2.2, I consider whether this implication of the doctrine is consistent with Descartes’s claim that bodies possess “forces” to persist in or to resist motion. 29. In a 1638 letter, for instance, Descartes asks his correspondent to “compare the suppositions of others with mine that is to say all of their real qualities, their substantial forms, their elements and similar things, the number of which is nearly infinite, with this alone, that all bodies are composed of some parts . . .” (To Morin, 13 July 1638, AT 2:200).

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DESCARTES ON CAUSATION And for this reason alone I consider the customary search for final causes to be totally useless in physics; there is considerable rashness in thinking myself capable of investigating the purposes of God. (AT 7:55)

This argument seems to allow for the possibility that God in fact has purposes, and indeed in the Fifth Replies Descartes granted his critic Gassendi that one may conjecture about God’s purposes “in ethics” (AT 7:375). But in other places he was concerned to deny that God has at least a certain sort of purpose. Thus, in connection with his doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths, Descartes insists that God is completely indifferent with respect to the question of what to create, to such an extent that no good, or truth, no believing, or acting, or omitting can be feigned, the idea of which was in the divine intellect before his will determines itself to produce such an effect. And I do not speak here of temporal priority, but whatever is of order, or nature, or ratione ratiocinate, as they call it, such that this idea of good impelled God to choose one rather than another. (AT 7: 432)

Given this view of divine indifference, it cannot be said that God had any purpose that led him to create as he did.30 It may be possible to reconcile this consequence with the suggestion in Descartes that God can have hidden purposes by distinguishing between antecedent and consequent purposes. God has no purposes antecedent to the act of creation that lead him to create in a certain way, but the act of creation itself could produce an idea of the good that conditions creatures. Divine purposes could perhaps be understood in terms of this created idea of the good. In any event, it is clear that for Descartes, we have no access by natural reason to any idea that would render intelligible the specific purposes deriving from God’s act of creation.31 It may seem, however, that this consideration does not rule out Aristotelian final causes. For as we saw in §1.2.2 (iii), the orthodox Aristotelian view is that that the forms even of beings that lack cognition and appetite are internal sources of final causality in nature. Given such a view, it might appear that Descartes’s argument that we have no access to divine purposes is simply irrelevant to the issue of whether we are entitled to appeal to final causes. However, I also noted in this earlier section the clear position in Suárez that “natural agents” lacking cognition and appetite can be said to be final causes only insofar as their action derives from God. This aspect of Suárez’s account of final causality reveals the depth of the confusion involved in Descartes’s persistent objection that in taking various real qualities and substantial forms to be responsible for various effects in nature, the schoolmen illicitly suppose that bodies have “tiny souls” that cognize the effects

30. Cf. the comment attributed to Descartes in the Conversation with Burman that we go astray when “we think of God as some great human being [magnum hominem], who proposes to himself such and such, and strives by such and such means, which certainly is most unworthy of God” (AT 5:158). See §5.1.2 for further discussion of Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. 31. I say ‘specific purposes’ to allow for Descartes’s claim, in the passage from his correspondence quoted toward the end of §1.2.2 (iii), that God created the world for his own sake.

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they bring about.32 Far from holding that qualities and forms are quasi-mental causes that cognize their ends, it is a consequence of the view of scholastics such as Suárez that the notion of final causality has no application when nature is considered in abstraction from the ends that direct divine concurrence. So such a scholastic would in fact grant Descartes that were we not entitled to appeal to divine ends in physics, we could not speak of final causality in that realm.33 In fact, it seems that there is one respect in which Descartes is closer to the original Aristotelian stance than was Suárez. Whereas Descartes holds that divine ends are inscrutable to the philosopher of nature, he nonetheless insists that we do have access to a kind of finality in the special case of the soul–body union. In the Sixth Meditation, for instance, he takes experience to reveal that the sensations that derive from motions in the brain are “most especially and most frequently conducive to the conservation of the health of the human being” (AT 7:87). Here, it seems, the sensory system has the function of conserving the health of the soul–body composite. Descartes could not, consistent with his prohibition of the appeal to divine ends, conclude that this function reflects God’s own purpose in creating the composite as he has.34 But the function also cannot be referred to any other mind that cognizes the end of conservation. Thus we appear to have—what scholastics such as Suárez could not allow—an appeal to a kind of finality that is not grounded in a cognition of ends.35 But though Descartes seems to have allowed for a kind of finality in the case of the soul–body composite, it is not clear that he allowed for the activity of final causes in that case. After all, he took brain motions to be the source of the various sensations that serve the purpose of conservation of health, and he indicated repeatedly that these motions are efficient causes of the sensations.36 For Suárez, final causes could be involved in this case only by means of God’s concursus with the action of secondary efficient causes. But Descartes eliminated this route to final causality when he

32. See To Mersenne, 26 Apr. 1643, AT 3:648; Sixth Replies, AT 7:441–42; PP III.56, AT 8-1:108. 33. In §2.1.3 (ii), however, I suggest that Descartes’s charge that the scholastics posit tiny souls may derive in part from his distinctive conception of eminent containment. 34. Admittedly, in the Sixth Meditation passage Descartes may seem to attribute the purpose of the sensory system to God. After all, he is concerned there to counter the objection that the fact that we are subject to “true errors of nature” in sensation conflicts with God’s goodness (AT 7:85). But though this point requires further consideration than I can provide here, I would simply suggest that Descartes can be read as arguing not that God had good intentions in creating the sensory system, but merely that the worthiness of this system shows that true sensory error is not obviously incompatible with God’s goodness. In terms that Laporte has introduced, the vindication of divine goodness requires an appeal only to the “internal finality” of the operation of the sensory system, and not to an “external finality” involving the ends that move God to create in a particular manner (Laporte 1928, 388). 35. For a further defense of the claim that this passage commits Descartes to a kind of natural teleology, see Simmons 2001; cf. Laporte 1928, 385–96. There is a further discussion in §4.1 of the nature of the union in Descartes. 36. As indicated in §4.2, however, there are some important complications for his account of the efficient causality of the motions in this case.

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eliminated the appeal to divine ends. From Suárez’s perspective, then, he left us with efficient causes that exhibit a natural teleology ungrounded in final causes. There is still rational teleology, which covers rational agents that act in accord with ends they cognize. Though Descartes denies that we can explain divine action in this way, he explicitly allows for this sort of explanation in the case of our own action. In the Second Replies, for instance, he cites as an axiom that “the will of a thinking thing is carried [ fertur] voluntarily and freely (for this is the essence of the will), but nevertheless inevitably, toward a clearly known good” (AT 7:166). This “carrying” would seem to correspond to the sort of final causality that Suárez took to be present in cases where the will of a created intelligent agent is inclined to act in a particular way by a cognized end.37 However, it is important to recall the view in Suárez that the cognized object produces in the will only a kind of “metaphorical motion,” and that strictly speaking it is only the will itself that produces the actual volitional act as an efficient cause (see, again, §1.2.2 (iii)). For this reason, Gilles Olivo concludes that in the view of Suárez, “the causality of the final cause is absorbed ultimately, that is to say, in its efficacy [effectivité], into that of efficient causality” (Olivo 1997, 99).38 Once more, Suárez provides the justification for excusing Descartes from providing room in his system for causes in his natural philosophy other than the efficient causes governed by the containment axiom.

2.1.3. Formal and Eminent Containment We have considered the requirement of the containment axiom that the reality of the effect be contained in the total and efficient cause. Now we are in a position to consider the requirement of that axiom that such a cause contain this reality formally or eminently. Descartes’s language in the Third Meditation can suggest that he was led to this requirement merely by the “light of nature,” with no dependence on previous teaching. But setting aside complications concerning objective reality (on which more presently), the requirement is straight from the scholastic tradition. As we have already seen, Suárez affirmed prior to Descartes that “all causes taken together” must formally or eminently contain the perfections they produce in their effect. We have also seen Bennett’s claim that Descartes had no deep understanding of the notion of causal containment. In contrast, it is a central thesis here that Descartes offered the material for a conception of formal and eminent containment on which they differ in important respects from the corresponding kinds of containment that Suárez posited.

(i) Formal Containment In the Third Meditation, Descartes illustrates his containment axiom by noting that heat cannot be induced in a subject “unless from a cause of at least the same order of perfection as heat” (AT 7:41). Similarly, Suárez earlier used the case of “fire when gener-

37. However, the case emphasized in the Second Replies passage seems to involve what for Suárez is merely voluntary rather than free action (see chapter 1, note 66). In §5.2, I consider further the relation of the accounts of free human action in Descartes and Suárez. 38. Cf. Carraud 2002, 159.

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ating fire” as an example of a “univocal cause,” that is, one that “effects an effect of the same kind” (efficit effectum ejusdem rationis) (MD XVII.2, ¶21, 1:591). Yet the specific accounts that Suárez and Descartes offer of the sort of containment present in this particular case are significantly different. Whereas Suárez held that the heat of both the generating and generated fire is a real accident that is a res distinct from the fire itself, Descartes rejects the containment of any such res in a purely material being. In Descartes’s view, the physical heat (as opposed to the sensation of heat) that the body contains and produces can be only a certain kind of local motion of parts of matter.39 Descartes’s official explication of formal containment reveals an even deeper disagreement with Suárez. In the list of definitions that he provides in his “synthetic” presentation of his system in the Second Replies,40 Descartes includes the stipulation that objects contain formally all that is “such as [talia . . . qualia] we perceive them” (AT 7:161). This follows his definition of the objective reality of an idea as “the entity of the thing [entitatem rei] represented by an idea, insofar as it is in the idea; . . . For whatever we perceive as in the objects of ideas, they are in the ideas themselves objectively” (AT 7:161). For Descartes, then, the paradigmatic case of formal containment is one in which the object as it exists outside of our idea of that object conforms to the objective reality of that idea. Descartes’s understanding of this case of course relies on his account of the distinction between formal and objective reality. According to the Second Replies, an object formally contains what is present objectively in our idea of that object just in case it is “such as we perceive” it. What is odd, from a certain scholastic perspective, is the reference here to the correspondence of what is in the object to a distinct sort of reality in the idea. Caterus protested in the First Objections that “objective being” is merely “the act of intellect itself terminating through a mode of the object,” and thus is merely “an extrinsic denomination, and nothing real” (AT 7:92).41 This understanding admittedly reflects a Thomistic view, and Scotists were more inclined to posit an “objective concept” as a tertium quid between the act of intellect and the cognized object.42 But on this particular point Suárez sided with the Thomists, holding that there is only a distinctio rationis between an act of intellect and its objective concept.43

39. See, for instance, Descartes’s account of heat in W II, AT 11:7–10. 40. Descartes distinguishes a synthetic presentation that involves demonstrations with definitions, postulates, and axioms from an analytic presentation, illustrated in the Meditations, in which a method for discovering the truths is employed (AT 7:155–56). 41. Cf. the discussion of Caterus’s position in Armogathe 1995. 42. On the difference between Thomists and Scotists on this point, and the relevance of this disagreement to Descartes’s understanding of objective reality, see Dalbriez 1929. This work is a critique of Gilson’s claim that “in scholastic thought, objective being is not a real being, but a rational being” (Gilson 1925, 321). For a reconsideration of this debate that is sympathetic to Dalbriez’s position, see Ariew 1999, ch. 2. Cf. the Scotistic interpretation of Descartes’s account of objective reality in Normore 1986. 43. Suárez was responding to the position of Durandus, which was defended by Suárez’s contemporary Vasquez. For discussion of this debate, with references, see, again, Dalbriez 1929. But cf. Renault 2000, which takes Ockham to be the source of the anti-Cartesian understanding of objective reality.

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For Suárez, then, the reality that exists in an idea (or, as he put it, in an objective concept) is just the reality as it exists in the object. This precision might not seem to be so important; after all, it appears that Suárez could agree with Descartes on the basic point that an object formally contains all that which is “such as we perceive it.” But the differences are significant in one case where Descartes’s explication of the relation between objective reality and formal containment is most problematic, namely, the case of sense perception. As we have seen, Descartes argues in the Sixth Meditation that bodies must exist as causes that formally contain what is present objectively in our sensory ideas. But there is scholarly disagreement over whether Descartes even allowed that bodily features are present objectively in sensory ideas.44 I myself take the argument in the Sixth Meditation to indicate clearly enough that he did intend to allow for such containment. Without the assumption that sensory ideas have an objective reality that requires a cause, this argument could not even get off the ground.45 Nonetheless, it must be admitted that Descartes’s claim in the Second Replies that features that exist formally in objects are “such as we perceive them” seems to fail in the case of sensory ideas. For Descartes himself warns after presenting the Sixth Meditation proof of the material world that bodies may not exist “in a way that is entirely such as [talia omnino . . . qualia] the senses comprehend them, insofar as the comprehension of the senses is in many cases very obscure and confused” (AT 7:80). It would seem that bodies cannot formally contain the qualities that we sense in a confused and obscure manner, and thus that there is no need for an external cause in the case of such sensations.46 I think we can go some ways toward reconciling the proof in the Sixth Meditation with the subsequent comment concerning the confused and obscure comprehension of the senses by emphasizing the following claim elsewhere in this text: [F]rom the fact that I sense diverse colors, sounds, odors, tastes, heat, hardness and the like, I correctly conclude that there are other things in bodies from which these various sensory perceptions come [adveniunt], variations corresponding to them [i.e., to the variations among the sensations], though perhaps not similar to them. (AT 7:81)

44. The disagreement is most evident in the massive literature on Descartes’s account in the Third Meditation of “material falsity.” For a representative discussion, see Kaufman 2000. 45. That is, the argument as presented in the Sixth Meditation. Interestingly, Descartes offers a version of this argument in the 1644 Principles that does not appeal to the objective containment in sensory ideas of what is formally contained in bodies; see PP II.1, AT 81:40–41. Even so, there is the point in this latter text that we know by means of sensory stimulation that matter “has variously different shaped and variously moving parts that give rise to our various sensations of colors, smells, pain and so on.” This point is connected to the account of objective containment in sensory ideas that I offer on Descartes’s behalf presently. Thanks to Marleen Rozemond for discussion of the significance of the differences between the two versions of Descartes’s proof of the existence of the material world. 46. Here I draw on and further develop the position I proposed in my discussion of this problem in Schmaltz 1992b.

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This passage indicates that sensory ideas that do not resemble bodily qualities nonetheless are systematically correlated with them. Because of these correlations, particular ideas can direct the mind to certain bodily qualities rather than others. Of course, we cannot know, simply by introspection, which qualities these ideas represent; that is why Descartes calls the ideas confused and obscure. Nonetheless, the ideas can represent the qualities in the broad sense just indicated. In virtue of the fact that the ideas so represent, they possess some sort of objective reality. Bodies formally contain what is in the sensory ideas objectively, then, in the sense that they possess the qualities to which these ideas direct the mind.47 Admittedly, this reading stretches thin the claim in the Second Replies that features contained objectively in the mind are contained formally in bodies only when they exist outside of the mind in a way that is “such as we perceive them.” But I take Descartes’s own remarks concerning confused and obscure sensory ideas to suggest a thin notion of being “such as” these ideas reveal. Moreover, this thin notion allows for the passage from the Second Replies to be reconciled with the suggestion in the Sixth Meditation that even though the objective reality of sensory ideas corresponds to the formal reality of bodily qualities, these qualities are often “not entirely such as” they are comprehended by sense.48

(ii) Eminent Containment I have mentioned Descartes’s stipulation in the Second Replies that objects contain formally all that is “such as we perceive them.” He continues by noting in that same passage that objects contain eminently what “indeed is not such [as we perceive], but greater, so that it is able to take the place of such a thing [that is as we perceive]” (AT 7:161). This explication is less than transparent, to say the least. Indeed, critics such as Radner have objected that Descartes offered no clear account of eminent containment, and thus had no clear explanation of a case in which a cause produces an effect that differs in nature from it.49 This is behind the charge in Radner and others that Descartes’s containment principle rules out the causal interaction of objects with different natures. To evaluate this charge, we need to determine whether we can make some sense of Descartes’s claim that objects eminently contain what is not such as we perceive but is “greater” than and “able to take the place” of what we do perceive.

47. I take the account of the objective reality of sensory ideas that I attribute to Descartes to be similar to Locke’s view in Essay II.xxxi.2 that whether our simple sensory ideas “be only constant Effects, or else exact Resemblances of something in things themselves,” still they “are all real and true, because they answer and agree to those Powers of Things, which produce them in our Minds, that being all that is requisite to make them real, and not fictions at Pleasure” (Locke 1975, 373). Locke’s claim that nonresembling sensory ideas “agree to” the bodily powers that produce them seems to me to be functionally equivalent to the view, which I attribute to Descartes, that such ideas objectively contain the bodily qualities to which they direct the mind. 48. See §4.2 for further discussion of Descartes’s account of the action of body on mind. In §3.2.1 (iii), I consider complications for formal containment connected to Descartes’s account of body–body interaction. 49. Radner 1985b, 232, 233–34.

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On one understanding, what is greater and able to take the place is simply the power to produce the existence of the object we perceive. This understanding informs the analysis of eminent containment that Eileen O’Neill has offered. On this analysis, Descartes held that a property ø is eminently contained in X if and only if: ø is not formally contained in X [i.e., X does not contain at least n degrees of ø]; X is an entity displaying a greater degree of relative independence than any possible Y which could contain ø formally (i.e., higher up in the ontological hierarchy than any such Y); and X has the power to bring about the existence of ø. (O’Neill 1987, 235)50

There is a weaker reading of the second clause, on which X is an entity displaying a greater degree of relative independence than ø, that is, is higher up in the ontological hierarchy than ø, as opposed to any possible Y that could contain ø formally. This weaker reading may seem to be supported by Descartes’s comment in the Third Meditation that since “extension, shape, position, and motion” are “merely modes of a substance,” they can be contained in him eminently given that he is thinking substance (AT 7:45).51 As we have seen, however, Descartes indicates in the Sixth Meditation that certain finite creatures can contain bodily effects eminently in virtue of the fact that they are “more noble than” corporeal substance (AT 7:79). Here it is not just the fact that the effects are mere modes that allows for eminent containment in these other substances; in addition, there is the fact that these substances are more noble than the corporeal substances that contain the effects formally.52 An initial problem for this analysis of eminent containment derives from the implication of Descartes’s simple ontological hierarchy that mental and bodily substances have the same reality as finite substances. Given this hierarchy, it would seem that bodily effects cannot be contained eminently in a finite mind, contra the remarks in the Sixth Meditation.53 However, we could get around this problem by appealing to Descartes’s own comment in correspondence that our soul “is much more noble [beaucoup plus noble] than body” (To Elisabeth, 15 Sept. 1645, AT 4:292).54 One way in which mind is “more noble” is indicated in the Sixth Meditation, which includes the claim that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by its very nature divisible, whereas mind is utterly indivisible” (AT 7:85–86). This difference indicates the

50. To my mind, O’Neill’s analysis marks an advance over Clatterbaugh’s view that ø is eminently contained in X if and only if X contains greater than n degrees of ø; see Clatterbaugh 1980, 391. 51. Thanks to David Ring, who pressed me to consider this point a number of years ago. 52. Descartes could not have made this point that his mind is more noble than body in the Third Meditation because he had not yet provided an account of the nature of body and of its distinction from mind. 53. On Gueroult’s interpretation of Descartes (see note 9), there would be no problem here for eminent containment in mind insofar as particular bodies, as modes, are lower on the ontological hierarchy than mental substances. But in the Sixth Meditation, the stress is on the fact that certain substances, presumably mental, are more noble than the corporeal substances that formally contain what is present objectively in our sensory ideas. 54. Thanks to Michael Della Rocca for drawing this passage to my attention.

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greater nobility of mind given Descartes’s claim in the Second Replies that “it is known per se that it is a greater perfection to be undivided than to be divided” (AT 7:138). The implication in Descartes, then, is that though created minds are below God insofar as they are finite, still they are above bodies insofar as they are indivisible. This implication yields the following “enhanced” ontological hierarchy: God

infinite indivisible substance

minds

finite indivisible substances

bodies

finite divisible substances

thoughts shapes/sizes/motions

modes of finite substances

Given this enhanced hierarchy, O’Neill’s analysis is consistent with the claim that particular bodies and their modes can be contained eminently in finite minds.55 Even so, there remains a problem with the consequence of the last clause of O’Neill’s definition that something can eminently contain ø only if it has the power to bring about the existence of ø. In defense of this clause, O’Neill appeals to Suárez, and in particular to his claim that “what is said to contain eminently has a perfection of such a superior nature that it contains by means of power [virtute] whatever is in the inferior perfection,” where this power is said to be the power that “can produce [ potest . . . efficere]” the effects of inferior perfection (MD XXX.1, ¶10, 2:63*; cited in O’Neill 1987, 239).56 But though Descartes was obviously influenced by the scholastic view that the effect must be contained formally or eminently in its total efficient cause, there are reasons to think that he did not adopt Suárez’s particular account of eminent containment. When he claims in the Third Meditation that his mind contains material things eminently, for instance, Descartes does not suggest that he has the power to create the material world. Indeed, in a 1641 exchange with his critic “Hyperaspistes,” Descartes makes clear his rejection of the claim that our mind has such a power. This critic objected that in Descartes’s view, “since a corporeal thing is not more noble than the idea that the mind has of it, and mind contains bodies eminently, it follows that all bodies, and thus the whole of this visible world, can be produced by the human mind” (AT 3:404). Such an implication is said to be

55. For complications concerning the eminent containment of matter in finite minds, see note 57. Descartes also speaks of material things as being eminently contained in God’s mind (as in the Sixth Meditation proof of the existence of the material world, at AT 7:79). As I note in §5.1.2, however, Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths renders this sort of containment problematic. 56. As O’Neill notes, Suárez went on to claim that “formally speaking” the power to bring about an effect cannot define eminent containment, since a cause is said to be able to produce an effect in virtue of the fact that it eminently contains it (MD XXX.1, ¶10, 2:63*; cited in O’Neill 1987, 239). But Suárez also indicated that we cannot understand eminent containment other than by its causal relation to the effect. In any event, it seems that having the power to cause an effect could be a necessary condition for eminent containment without being definitionally equivalent to it.

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problematic insofar as it undermines our confidence that God alone created the visible world. In response, Descartes protests that we can produce “not, as objected, the whole of this visible world, but the idea of the whole of things that are in this visible world” (AT 3:428). The suggestion here is that even though the whole visible world is contained in our mind eminently, we do not have the power to produce its extra-mental existence.57 Eminent containment would seem to be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for something to be able to produce features it does not formally contain.58 Nevertheless, it seems that we could substitute for O’Neill’s last clause the claim that X has at least the power to bring about the reality of ø as present objectively in X’s idea of ø. It is this power that, in the terms of the Second Replies, is “not such” as we perceive “but greater, so that it is able to take the place” of what we perceive. This power is able, in particular, to produce bodily qualities insofar as they are present objectively in the mind.59 We therefore have the following alternative to O’Neill’s analysis of eminent containment: A property ø is eminently contained in X if and only if: ø is not formally contained in X; X is an entity displaying a greater degree of relative independence than any possible Y which could contain ø formally (i.e., higher up in the ontological hierarchy than any such Y); and X has a power that suffices to produce the objective reality that is present in X’s idea of ø.

This alteration of O’Neill’s account may seem to be minor, but in fact it serves to highlight an important difference between the accounts of eminent containment in Suárez and Descartes. Suárez had no difficulty applying the notion of eminent containment to the case of bodily causes, as for instance when he held that a heavy body (unum grave) that moves another heavy body to a particular place contains that place

57. The eminent containment of the whole of matter in finite minds is more problematic given Descartes’s view that this matter is an “indefinite” rather than a finite substance. Indeed, he tells Regius in correspondence that he could not think of indefinite extension “unless the magnitude of the world also was or at least could be indefinite” (24 May 1640, AT 3:64). But the “could be” perhaps suggests that there need not be anything indefinitely extended in order for our mind to think it. Moreover, there is the claim in the Fourth Meditation that our will is in some sense unrestricted, and that it is in fact in virtue of our possessing such a will that we understand ourselves to bear in some way the image and likeness of God (AT 7:56–57). Given this feature of mind, we could perhaps be said to contain even indefinite extension eminently. For discussion of the complications here, see Wilson 1999a. 58. Cf. the critique of O’Neill’s account of eminent containment in Gorham 2003, 11–13. Beyond objecting to the explication of eminent containment of an effect in terms of a causal power to produce that effect, however, Gorham rejects in general any account on which the eminently contained effect is to be reduced to other features that the cause formally contains. The alternative to O’Neill’s account that I offer presently is reductionist in this sense. 59. It is important to hold that it is the power that “takes the place” rather than the objective reality itself, given that Descartes emphasizes the difference between eminent and objective containment when he notes that an effect must be contained in its cause “not merely objectively or representatively [objective sive repraesentative], but formally or eminently” (PP I.23, AT 8-1:11).

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“virtually or eminently, but not formally,” since that place is contained only in the “active principle” that brings about the downward motion (MD XVIII.9, ¶10, 1:671). I mentioned above Descartes’s ridicule of the scholastic attribution of tiny souls to bodies, and at one point he expresses his objection in terms of the very example of the action of gravitas that Suárez used here. Thus, in the Sixth Replies Descartes notes the misguided thought he had in his youth that “heaviness [gravitas] carried bodies toward the center of the earth, as if it contained in itself some cognition of this” (AT 7:442).60 We have seen that the accusation that the scholastics attributed cognition of ends to natural beings is misplaced. But what is interesting is Descartes’s apparent assumption that a future effect not actually present in the cause can be contained in that cause only by means of cognition. Implicit in this assumption is the rejection of the view in Suárez that there can be qualities or powers in bodies “more noble than” bodily effects that eminently contain those effects.61 Descartes held that all alterable features of body have the same kind of reality as modes of extension, and that only infinite or finite indivisible minds can be more noble than bodily substances and their modifications. For Descartes, then, the bodily principle that Suárez posited as eminently containing its effect could be conceived only on the model of a mind that acts in accord with its cognition of an end. In the case of all other total bodily causes, only formal containment can be at issue.62

2.2. THE CONSERVATION AXIOM After concluding in the Third Meditation that it is manifest by the light of nature that God must exist as the cause of the objective reality of his idea of God as infinitely perfect substance, Descartes notes that once his concentration on the argument for this conclusion relaxes he no longer can remember why his idea of a being more perfect than himself must be caused by such a being (AT 7:47). To remedy the uncertainty,

60. For further discussion of Descartes’s use of the heaviness analogy, see §4.3.2. 61. But see also the discussion toward the end of §4.2.1 of one way in which Suárez’s notion of eminent containment is more restrictive than Descartes’s. 62. This implication of the view of eminent containment that I attribute to Descartes can be contrasted with the position, which the English malebranchiste John Norris attributed to “the Modern Reformers of Philosophy,” that all Bodies that we call Hot, [are] so only Eminently and Potentially, as they are productive of Heat in us.” This is said to be a replacement for the “Old Distinction” between heat as a quality formally contained in certain objects and heat as eminently contained in bodily causes of this quality that eliminates the first part of this distinction (Norris 1693, 3:21–22). It is likely that Norris counted Descartes among the modern reformers, since he went on to say that Malebranche alone rejected this position in the moderns. But we have seen that Descartes himself took bodies to formally contain what is present objectively in our sensory ideas. And I know of no passage where he referred to the eminent containment of effects in bodily causes. I suspect that Norris simply assumed that Descartes accepted the scholastic view that a quality that is present in a bodily power to produce that quality is eminently contained in the body that has that power. Thanks to Eileen O’Neill for drawing my attention to the passage from Norris.

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he proposes another argument for the conclusion that he could not exist if God did not. The new argument is not entirely distinct from the first argument, since it too relies on an application of the containment axiom to the case of the objective reality of his idea of God. Descartes recognizes this point when he admits that the second argument is not so much a new argument as “a more thorough examination” of the original argument (First Replies, AT 7:106).63 But there is a distinctive element of the second argument that is crucial for our purposes. This element is introduced after the first portion of the proof, in which Descartes claims that he cannot have derived his existence from himself, since in that case he would have produced in himself all of the perfections he desires but lacks. He then considers the objection that he may not need any cause of his existence now given the assumption that he has always existed. Descartes responds: [S]ince the whole time of life can be divided into innumerable parts, each single one of which depends in no way on the remaining, from the fact that I was shortly before, it does not follow that I must be now, unless some cause as it were creates me anew at this moment [me quasi rursus creet ad hoc momentum], that is conserves me. For it is perspicuous to those attending to the nature of time that entirely the same force and action [eadem . . . vi et actione] plainly is needed to conserve a thing at each single moment during which it endures, as would be needed to create it anew, if it did not yet exist; to the extent that conservation differing solely by reason from creation is also one of those things that is manifest by the natural light. (AT 7:49)

The claim here that “the same force and action is needed to conserve a thing . . . as would be needed to create it anew” is reflected in the axiom in the Second Replies— which I have called the conservation axiom—that “no less a cause is required to conserve a thing than to produce it at first” (AT 7:165). In the Third Meditation, the conservation axiom is said to be perspicuous to those who consider “the nature of time,” and is said to yield the result that conservation differs “solely by reason” from creation. In what follows I consider three aspects of the position indicated in the Third Meditation passage. The first is the nature of the conservation that Descartes takes to be required for the continued existence of any creature. His ultimate view is that God alone can conserve the being of created substances. The second aspect is Descartes’s understanding of “the nature of time.” It turns out that he offers an account of temporal parts of duration that is incompatible with the temporal atomism that some commentators have attributed to him. Finally, there is Descartes’s argument that given the nature of time, conservation can differ from creation solely “by reason.” Though this argument seems to conflict with an argument in Suárez for the lack of any real difference between creation and conservation, in the end Descartes embraces the basic

63. Cf. Descartes’s letter of 2 May 1644, at AT 4:112. In the synthetic presentation of his system in the Second Replies, however, Descartes presents the two arguments as distinct; see propositions II and III at AT 7:167–68.

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Suárezian conclusion that the created world depends continually on the original divine act that resulted in the creation of that world.

2.2.1. Divine Conservation In the Fifth Objections, Gassendi challenged the use of the conservation axiom in the Third Meditation by claiming that Descartes could have a power to conserve himself that is not a power to create himself anew, but rather a power “that suffices to guarantee that you are preserved unless a corrupting cause intervenes” (AT 7:302). The suggestion here is that the presence of such a power is revealed by the fact that continuation in existence is the default condition. What requires an external cause is not this continuation, but only the initiation or cessation of existence. I argue in the next chapter that Descartes invokes something very much like the tendency to persist in existence in his explanation in the Principles of his first law of motion (see §3.2.1 (i)). In his response to Gassendi, however, he insists that the claim that conservation requires the “continual action of the original cause” is “something that all Metaphysicians affirm as manifest.” Drawing on remarks from Thomas’s Summa Theologiae noted in §1.1.2, Descartes appeals in the Fifth Replies to the distinction between causae secundum fieri, or causes of becoming, and causae secundum esse, or causes of being.64 Indeed, Descartes follows Thomas in illustrating the distinction between these two kinds of causes by noting the difference between the builder as the causa secundum fieri of the house and the sun as the causa secundum esse of the light.65 His claim in the Fifth Replies is that just as the continuing action of the sun is required for the light to remain in existence, so the continuing action of God is required for creatures to remain in existence (AT 7:369).66 The example of the sun landed Descartes in some trouble, since in correspondence with him the pseudonymous Hyperaspistes attempted to defend Gassendi by noting that the Bologna spur, a phosphorescent rock, can retain light in a closed room (July 1641, AT 3:405). But Descartes responds that the light of the rock is perhaps not the same as the light that constantly depends on the sun, and in any case that even if the sun example fails, it is “more certain that nothing can exist without God’s concursus,

64. Descartes indicates in a 1639 letter to Mersenne that he brought with him from France a Bible and “une Somme de S. Thomas” (AT 2:630). 65. See also the example of the builder in the passage from the Conversation with Burman cited in §2.1.2 (i), at note 18. 66. Descartes’s conclusion that light requires the continuing action of the sun is no doubt connected to his own view that light is not a motion but rather the instantaneous effect of pressure deriving from the source of illumination (see, for instance, PP III.64, AT 8-1:115). Whereas a motion could perhaps endure apart from the action that initially produces it, an instantaneous effect could not. Interestingly, Thomas agreed that light cannot involve motion, since its diffusion is instantaneous (ST I.67.2). However, his insistence that light requires the action of the sun derives rather from his view that the quality of light depends essentially on the action of the substantial form of a self-luminous body (see chapter 1, note 21). This line of argument obviously would not have been attractive to Descartes. Thanks to Andrew Janiak for discussion of this point.

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than no light of the sun without the sun” (Aug. 1641, AT 3:429). Here Descartes was moving toward the version of the Thomistic secundum fieri/secundum esse distinction in Suárez, according to which God alone can be a cause secundum esse.67 In a Suárezian context, it is admittedly odd that Descartes refers to God’s concursus rather than his act of conservation. We will discover in the next chapter that there is in fact some question whether Descartes follows scholastics such as Suárez in thinking that divine conservation differs from God’s concurrence with the actions of secondary causes. Even so, his use of the language of concursus in the passage above is supposed to indicate primarily that God must make a causal contribution for any dependent being to exist. However, why not conclude with Gassendi that a being, once created, can persist on its own? To put the point in terms of Hyperaspistes’s example, why not hold that objects can continue to subsist without God’s concursus in the same way that the Bologna spur can continue to glow without the influence of the sun? The answer in Descartes is connected to his version of the principle of sufficient reason, reflected in the axiom in the Second Replies that every existing thing, including God, requires a “cause or reason” (causa sive ratio) of its existence (AT 7:164–65).68 I have mentioned his conclusion that in the case of God, the reason is provided by God’s essence, which serves as the formal cause of his existence (see §2.1.2 (ii.a)). But since essence is distinct from existence in the case of every other existing object, the cause or reason of beings other than God must be provided by some efficient cause. Because this cause provides the reason for the existence of the object at any time, it is required not only for the initial creation of the object but also for its subsequent conservation. In addition, Descartes holds that the cause of an object secundum esse must be active at each moment that object exists. Aquinas had concluded that just as something cannot be in the process of becoming without the action of its cause secundum fieri, so that thing cannot subsist in being without the action of its cause secundum esse. If an object needs the activity of a cause secundum esse at all, it needs the activity of this kind of cause throughout its existence (ST I.104.1; see §1.1.2). As we know, Suárez also accepted this Thomistic conclusion, arguing that a creature depends on God for its existence at each moment, since God is “its cause directly and per se with respect to its esse.” He held that there would be such a dependence even if—as Descartes supposes in the Third Meditation—the object were not created in time but existed from eternity. For even in this case, since the object is not God, it must have its being from another, and ultimately from God (see §1.2.3 (i)). This line of argument in Suárez is reinforced by his analysis of efficient causality. In opposition to the view of some Thomists—but, he insisted, not of Thomas

67. See the discussion in §1.2.3 (i) of Suárez’s revision of the Thomistic distinction. 68. For the link between this axiom and the principle of sufficient reason, see Carraud 2002, especially ch. 2. As Carraud emphasizes, however, Descartes’s version differs from the more familiar version in Leibniz insofar as Descartes insisted on the unintelligibility of the divine creation of eternal truths (Carraud 2002, 288–93). In §5.1.2, I consider this doctrine and its relation to Descartes’s axiomatic requirement that there be a “cause or reason” for everything that exists.

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himself—that a cause can remain efficacious even after its action has ceased, Suárez held that an effect can depend on an efficient cause only insofar as that cause is active (MD XVIII.10, ¶8, 1:682). Applied to the case of conservation, the consequence is that created objects that depend essentially on God for their being can continue to so depend only insofar as God continues to produce that being through an action.69 Descartes in effect adopts Suárez’s anti-Thomistic (though, for Suárez, not anti-Thomas) premise when he appeals in the First Replies to the fact, revealed by the light of nature, that something “does not properly have the reason of a cause, unless for as long as it produces the effect, and thus is not prior to it” (AT 7:108). For Descartes, no less than for Suárez, an object cannot depend for its being on God unless God is active as an efficient cause of that being at each moment it exists.70 In his letter to Hyperaspistes, Descartes offers a further Suárezian argument for the necessity of divine conservation. Descartes insists there that “if God ceased his concursus, at once all that he has created would go into nothingness, because, before they were created, and he offered his own concursus, they were nothing.” He continues by noting that “it is not possible that God destroy other than by ceasing his concursus, because otherwise he would tend to non-being through a positive action” (AT 3:429). These remarks are reminiscent of Suárez’s argument that God cannot conserve the being of an object merely permissively, through not depriving them of their being, rather than positively, by means of his efficient causation of that being that derives from an action. The argument is that since God is omnipotent, he can annihilate any creature, and since every action by its nature tends toward some positive being, he can annihilate only by omitting some action (MD XXI.1, ¶14, 1:789). Thus, divine conservation must consist in the continuation of that action by which God gave being to creatures.71 Admittedly, Descartes’s claim in the passage from the Third Meditation concerning “the nature of time” is only that there must be some cause that “quasi creates anew” at each moment, not that God must be the cause. In the First Replies, however, Descartes notes, “[W]hat I have not written before, that [conservation] can in no way come from any secondary cause, but altogether from that in which there is such great power that it conserves a thing external to itself, so much the more conserves itself by its own power, and thus is a se” (AT 7:111). The need for divine conservation in the case of substances is clear from a passage from a 1642 letter to Regius, cited in §1.3, in which Descartes insists that God alone can create a substance de novo (AT 3:505). According to Descartes, then, God alone can be the cause secundum esse of the initial existence of a substance, and thus he is the only being who can conserve this substance in existence through the continuation of the act of creating it.

69. I think this line of argument is implicit in Suárez’s discussion in MD XXI.1, ¶¶6–15, 1:787–79; see §1.2.3 (i). In this earlier section, Suárez presents himself as correcting and developing Thomas’s argument in ST I.104.1. 70. For this point, see also Secada 1990, 49–51. 71. Cf. Thomas’s invocation of the claim in Augustine that nature is annihilated once God withdraws his ruling power (ST I.104.1).

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But a central question, given the scholastic rejection of occasionalism, is whether Descartes allows for any causes other than God. In the passage from the Conversation with Burman that I considered in §2.1.2 (i), he is said to hold that God, in producing the being of something ex nihilo, acts as a total cause, and thus produces something similar to himself. I noted in that section that if the containment axiom requires that total causality involve creation ex nihilo, then given the remarks in this passage the axiom would be restricted to divine action. Indeed, Jean-Luc Marion has suggested recently that Descartes restricts true efficient causality to God alone.72 In addition to the remarks to Burman,73 Marion cites Descartes’s claim in a 1645 letter, in defense of the conclusion that God is the cause of all effects of human free will, that the distinction of the Schools between universal and particular causes is out of place here: because what makes the sun, for example, the cause of flowers is not the cause of the fact that tulips differ from roses, [since] their production depends also on other particular causes to which they are not subordinated; but God is such a universal cause of all that he is in the same way the total cause. (To Elisabeth, 6 Oct. 1645, AT 4:314)74

However, the claim here is not that God is the universal and total cause in such a way as to exclude all other causes. Rather, it is simply that the universality of God’s causality differs from the universal causality of the sun insofar as the former does not involve the contribution of particular causes not subordinated to it. All derivative causes, whether universal or particular, are subordinated to God’s distinctive sort of universal and total causality. Some combination of universal and particular derivative causes can still be sufficient in their order to bring about their effect, and thus are still subject to the containment axiom. But this sort of total cause nonetheless is dependent on God’s total causality, which unlike derivative causes includes an act of conservation not distinct from the act of creation ex nihilo. We have seen the implication in Descartes that only God’s universal causality can create and conserve substantial being. However, there still seems to be room in his system for a derivative sort of causation of the modifications of substance. This causation of modes must be subordinated to God’s causation of the substances the modes modify, since the existence of the modes themselves depends on the existence of these substances. In this sense, God can be said to be the total causes of the effects produced by derivative causes. Even so, it seems that these causes could produce effects that do not derive immediately from God. In terms of the Thomistic distinction that Descartes employs, derivative causes could be causes secundum fieri of modes that God does not directly produce as the cause secundum esse of the

72. Thus Marion speaks of “the reduction of all kinds of causalities to the efficient causality as only divine” (Marion 1991, 288). 73. Cited in Marion 1991, 289 n.24, in support of the conclusion that “God alone can exercise total causality.” 74. Cited in Marion 1991, 287. I will return in §5.3.1 to a consideration of the ramifications of this passage for Descartes’s account of human freedom.

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substances the modes modify.75 Descartes of course rejected the scholastic view that derivative causes can educe from matter forms that are res distinct from matter. But since he follows Suárez in thinking that modes are not res distinct from the substances they modify, Descartes’s rejection of this view does not prevent him from holding that such causes educe from material substance modes that are contained in it merely potentially. Whether Descartes can allow for this sort of derivative causation of modes depends on whether his metaphysical system allows for the attribution of causal power to beings other than God; this is an issue that remains to be resolved. Even so, it seems clear enough that his view of God’s universal and total causality of the created world does not straightforwardly commit him to occasionalism.76

2.2.2. “The Nature of Time” In the Third Meditation passage that introduces the conservation axiom, Descartes claims that careful attention to “the nature of time,” and in particular to the fact that time is divisible into “innumerable parts,” each independent of the others, reveals that conservation differs solely by reason from creation. §2.2.3 will be devoted to the argument that this feature of temporality provides support for the conservation axiom. Here our concern will be to consider Descartes’s view of the nature of temporal parts and of their mutual independence. In the Principles, Descartes holds that when time is considered in general, apart from the duration of particular objects, it is a mere “mode of thinking,” a mental abstraction (PP I.57, AT 8-1:26–27). What is mind-dependent here is a particular measure of duration, such as when we measure our life in days and years by comparing it with other regular motions. In line with a view that Suárez offered previously, however, Descartes holds that the duration that is measured is itself distinct only in reason, and not in reality, from the enduring object. In particular, he claims that we cannot distinctly conceive of a substance apart from its duration, and also cannot so conceive the duration, as it exists in the substance, apart from the substance itself (PP I.62, AT 8-1:30).77

75. Cf. the discussion in §3.1.3 of the distinction between modal and substantial causes that Garber attributes to Descartes. 76. On the basis of these considerations, I would dispute Gorham’s conclusion that the remarks in the letter to Elisabeth reveal that “God does not leave it to other causes to produce our diverse volitions and bodily movements, nor rely on them for assistance. Rather, he brings about all of the particular volitions and movements directly and by himself” (Gorham 2004, 412–13). I think Descartes would agree that God produces the being of everything “directly and by himself.” But in the case of becoming, his claim in the letter to Elisabeth seems to be merely that his universal causality does not involve the causal contribution of particular causes that are not subordinated to him. Gorham stresses the claim in Descartes’s letter that God would not be perfect “if there were something in the world that did not come entirely from him” (AT 4:314, cited in Gorham 2004, 412, n.104), but in light of the remarks that follow I would read the claim that an effect “comes entirely from God” as saying that there is no cause of the effect that is not subordinated to a divine causality that is both universal and total. 77. See Suárez’s claim that there is merely a distinctio rationis between duration and the existing object (MD L.1, ¶5, 1:914*).

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So much for time and duration. What about their parts? Descartes notes in the Principles that the parts of an extended substance are themselves really distinct substances, since each can exist on its own apart from the others (PP I.60, AT 8-1:28).78 If temporal parts are to be conceived in the same manner, however, we have the strange result that all substances are composed of distinct substantial time-slices. For we have seen that when it is considered in objects, time is nothing other than an attribute that is distinct only ratione from the enduring substance. And if the duration is composed of distinct substantial parts, the substance itself must be composed of distinct substantial parts over time, just as extended substance is composed of distinct substantial parts at any one time. There is reason to think that this result would be unacceptable for Descartes. In the conservation passage from the Third Meditation, he considers his own temporal duration as a thinking thing. Yet Descartes is clear in the Meditations that “it is one and the same mind that wills, that senses, that has intellectual perceptions” (AT 7:86). Here it seems that the mind not only is “utterly indivisible” at a particular time, but remains one and the same unified substance over time.79 There is an exchange relevant to this point in the Conversation with Burman. When confronted with the objection that it follows from the temporality of thought that thought itself is extended and divisible, Descartes is reported to claim that though thought is “extended and divisible as far as duration, which can be divided into parts,” nonetheless “it is not extended and divisible as far as its nature, insofar as it remains unextended” (AT 5:148). The view here is that even though the mind has an extended and divisible duration, it always remains unextended and indivisible by its very nature, insofar as it is an immaterial res cogitans.80 I have suggested that given that the mind is indivisible by nature, the parts into which its duration can be divided cannot be substantial parts. What sort of parts, then? Of the three kinds of distinction that Descartes borrowed from Suárez— namely, the distinctiones realis, modalis, and rationis (see §1.2.1)—it would seem to be the modal distinction that is applicable to the case of temporal parts. Descartes

78. As Descartes makes clear elsewhere, the three-dimensional parts of body are distinct from its two-dimensional modes; see Fourth Replies, AT 7:250–51; Sixth Replies, AT 7:433–34. 79. Descartes’s talk of extended substance taking on different modes over time suggests that he thinks that even though such a substance is divisible, it too can remain the same substance over time. 80. This passage is admittedly suspect. Descartes is reported to continue by claiming that God similarly is an unextended being who has a duration that is divisible into parts, and that since we can now divide God’s duration, we can divide that duration as it was prior to his creation of the world (AT 5:148–49). In his own correspondence around the same time of his meeting with Burman, however, Descartes denies both that God has a successive duration (To Arnauld, 4 June 1648, AT 5:193), and that there was any such duration prior to the creation of the world (To More, 15 Apr. 1649, AT 5:343). But even though there may well be a corruption in the report of Descartes’s remarks to Burman, I claim presently that Descartes can accept a sense in which the duration of his indivisible mind is divisible into parts (though, in contrast to the case of the extension of a body, not into substantial parts).

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indicates that a modal distinction holds between two modes of the same substance, since “we can know one mode without the other, and vice versa, but neither however without the same substance in which they inhere” (PP I.61, AT 8-1:29). My proposal is that in contrast to the case of the parts of extended substance, he takes the different parts of the duration of a substance to be modally distinct from each other. A clear counterexample to this proposal may seem to be provided by Descartes’s claim in the Principles that “in created things, that which never has in itself diverse modes, such as existence and duration in the thing existing and enduring, must be called not qualities or modes but attributes” (PP I.56, AT 8-1:26). Isn’t the indication here that duration is not subject to modification?81 However, we need to remember Descartes’s position that thought and extension are also attributes that are not subject to modification considered as such. As he notes in correspondence with Arnauld, [A]s extension, which constitutes the nature of body, differs greatly from various shapes or modes of extension that it assumes, so thought, or thinking nature, in which I take the essence of the human mind to consist, is much other than this or that act of thinking. (29 July 1648, AT 5:221)

In the same way, he could say that invariable duration differs greatly from the various modes that it has at different moments. Just as Descartes can distinguish the continuing attributes of thought and extension from the varying modes that it assumes, then, so he can distinguish the duration of thinking and extended substances from the varying modes that constitute its distinguishable parts.82 Thus far I have emphasized the importance of distinguishing Descartes’s view of the parts of time or duration from his view of the parts of extended substance. But there is a reading of Descartes—more popular in the past, perhaps, than currently—on which the difference seems to be even greater than I have indicated. Descartes argues explicitly that there can be no indivisible atoms on the grounds that any portion of extension can be divided into smaller parts.83 Yet Gueroult, most prominently, insists that he takes temporal duration to be a discontinuous collection of indivisible parts.84

81. In §3.2.2, I consider an objection along these lines that Alan Gabbey has offered. 82. I will return to this interpretation of Descartes’s account of duration and its parts in the course of my discussion in §3.2.2 of his view of bodily force. 83. See, e.g., PP II.20, AT 8-1:51–51; To Gibieuf, 10 Jan. 1642, AT 3:475–77; To More, 5 Feb. 1649, AT 5:273–74. 84. The prominence of Gueroult’s interpretation in the earlier literature is reflected in Yvon Belaval’s remark that it is common knowledge that for Descartes time is discontinuous (Belaval 1960, 149). There is documentation of the relevant literature in Arthur 1988. For a more recent defense of an “atomist” interpretation of Descartes’s account of time, see Levy 2005. Cf. Leibniz’s claim in a 1699 letter to De Volder that since “the Cartesians” hold that “God creates all things continually” and that “moving a body is nothing but reproducing it in successively different places,” they are committed to the conclusion that “motion in its essence is nothing but a succession of leaps through intervening intervals, which flow from the action of God” (Leibniz 1978, 2:193/Leibniz 1969, 521).

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He argues that even though Descartes grants that time can be viewed as continuous from “the point of view of created things, or in the abstract” (Gueroult 1953, 1:280–81), still he holds that there is “the point of view of creation and of the concrete” from which time is conceived as a “repetition of indivisible and discontinuous creative instants” (1:275). In Gueroult’s view, then, Cartesian conservation consists in the successive creation of independent atemporal instants, the atomic parts of duration. I have mentioned the emphasis in the work of Maimonides on the temporal atomism of the occasionalistic Mutakallimun (see §1.1.1). Even so, scholastic opponents of occasionalism, represented most notably by Thomas, rejected this account of time.85 Gueroult’s critics insist that Descartes also rejected the view of conservation as continual re-creation, arguing that he took durationless instants to be boundaries of temporally extended temporal parts rather than distinct temporal parts of time.86 However, the debate on this issue has tended to bog down on the interpretation of technical terminology in particular passages in Descartes, and there is the view in the recent literature that the texts do not decisively favor the thesis that instants are ultimate parts over the thesis that they are mere boundaries of parts.87 As will become clear in §2.2.3, my sympathies are with Gueroult’s critics. But I think that there are considerations against his interpretation of Descartes’s account of temporality that do not rest solely on the issue of how he understood his technical terminology. These considerations are related to the debate in contemporary metaphysics between “endurantists,” who hold that persisting objects endure by being wholly present at different times, and “perdurantists,” who hold that persisting objects perdure by being composed of distinct temporal parts.88 The main issue here concerns not the status of instants, but rather the nature of persisting objects. And on this point, Descartes seems to me to be clearly in the endurantist camp.89 For on the view that I have proposed above, he holds that there is an important difference between spatial and temporal extension. The indication in Descartes is that spatial extension is composed of parts that can exist on their own as substances. But on my proposal, he was committed to denying that temporal extension is such a composite. The sort of distinction that applies to temporal parts is not a real distinction, as in the case of spatial parts, but rather a modal distinction. Insofar as they are only modally distinct, however, temporal parts are modifications of the

85. Thomas accepted the Aristotelian view that time is the measure of the continuous motion of the heavens, and so is itself continuous; see, e.g., ST I.10.6. Cf. Suárez’s endorsement of the view in Aristotle that “time has its extension from motion” and that “there is no other extension of time than the continuity of its succession” (MD L.8, ¶4, 1:949*). 86. See Beyssade 1979, ch. 3 and conclusion, and Arthur 1988, 373–75. This position is anticipated in Laporte 1950, 158–60. 87. See, for instance, Secada 1990 and Garber 1992, 266–73. 88. For a helpful discussion of the various issues involved in the debate over endurantism and perdurantism, see Haslanger 2003. 89. Gorham 2006 defends a reading on which Descartes understood the different parts of time to be substantially distinct, and thus was committed to perdurantism. As Gorham admits, however, this sort of perdurantism is incompatible with Descartes’s insistence on the simplicity of the soul. I take this conflict to provide reason to reject Gorham’s reading.

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same underlying attribute of duration, that is, for Descartes, the same enduring substance. Gueroult’s interpretation requires that there is for Descartes an important difference between spatial and temporal extension insofar as only the latter can be composed of independent atomic parts. I agree that Descartes took these two kinds of extension to be fundamentally distinct, but I understand the relevant difference to be between a spatial extension divisible into distinct substantial parts, on the one hand, and a temporal extension divisible only into distinct modes of a single attribute of duration, on the other. As I argue presently, the persistence of this attribute is coupled with a single act of divine conservation identical to the act by which God originally created the substance that is only distinct by reason from that attribute.

2.2.3. Conservation and Creation We can now turn to Descartes’s argument in the Third Meditation that it is evident from the fact that the different parts of his life are independent of each other that “conservation differs solely by reason from creation” (AT 7:49). In the Second Replies, this connection is reflected in the axiom that “the present time does not depend on the proximate preceding [time], and thus no less a cause is required to conserve a thing than to produce it at first” (AT 7:165). We need to consider first how the fact that temporal parts are independent shows that the same sort of cause is required to conserve as to create, and then how this latter result is connected to the conclusion that conservation differs solely by reason from creation. With respect to the first point, recall Descartes’s Suárezian conclusion that the activity of the cause must be simultaneous with the production of its effect. Given that distinct parts of time are not simultaneous, it cannot be the case that causal activity at a previous portion of time suffices for the existence of an effect at a subsequent portion of time.90 The conclusion that the simultaneous cause that suffices for the existence of the effect during that portion of time must be of the same sort as a creative cause depends on Descartes’s claim that any object that has an existence distinct from its essence requires an efficient cause secundum esse that produces the existence of this object at each moment it exists (see §2.2.1). In the case of a cause secundum fieri, the cause acts on preexisting material, and what is produced can continue to exist after the cause has acted. But in the case of the cause secundum esse, there is no preexisting material, since the very being of the object is produced. This object must therefore be produced ex nihilo, and in that respect this production does not differ from the initial creation of the object ex nihilo.

90. Here I follow the summary of Descartes’s line of argument in Gorham 2004, 391–400. Gorham considers the claim in Secada 1990 that Descartes cannot take the causal independence of different parts of time to derive simply from the condition of causal simultaneity, since causal activity at an earlier portion of time could produce an effect at a later portion of time by producing something during an overlapping interval that produces that effect. As Gorham indicates, the counterexample does not succeed, since the overlapping interval can itself be divided at just the point where the initial points of time are distinguished, and that nothing prior to that point can suffice for the production of something after that point (Gorham 2004, 398).

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One problem, however, is that this conclusion seems to fall short of the doctrine that conservation differs solely by reason from creation. For Descartes himself indicates that when applied to God, this doctrine requires not only that conservation is the same type of act as creation, or is merely type-identical to it, but also that it is the very same act, and so is token-identical. Thus, in the Discourse he notes that it is “an opinion commonly received among the Theologians” that “the action by which [God] now conserves [the world] is entirely the same as [toute la mesme que] that by which he has created it” (DM V, AT 6:45). This same theological opinion backs his later claim in the Principles that “the world now continues to be conserved by the same action [eadem actione] as created it then” (PP II.42, AT 8-1:66). In fact, this theological opinion can be found in Suárez. Recall his conclusion in the Disputations that the creation of an object does not differ in reality from the direct and immediate per se conservation of that object (see §1.2.3 (i)). Suárez did note the objection that conservation seems to differ from creation insofar as they occur at different times. Far from making manifest that conservation does not differ from creation, as Descartes claims, the distinction of the parts of time is here presented as an obstacle to recognizing this conclusion. Suárez’s response to this objection is that since the time of creation is joined continuously with the subsequent time of conservation, we can hold that there is a single continuous effect deriving from a single action. It is due to this sort of continuity, he concluded, that “Saint Thomas said that conservation is as it were continued creation [quasi continuatam creationem]” (MD XXI.2, ¶4, 1:791). This last point is linked to Descartes’s claim in the Third Meditation that there must be some cause that “as it were creates me anew at this moment” (me quasi rursus creet ad hoc momentum) (AT 7:49). The reference here to creation rursus may seem to suggest that the creation that conserves is not merely a continuation of the act of creation, as in the case of Thomas and Suárez, but rather an entirely new act. Indeed, I noted at the outset of this chapter that Bennett takes Descartes to embrace this suggestion. But if we follow Bennett’s view on this issue, then the premise in Descartes that the parts of time are distinct not only cannot lead to the common theological opinion that initial creation and subsequent conservation are the same act, but actually conflicts with that opinion insofar as it requires that at each moment an object must be created anew by a distinct act. As in the case of Thomas, however, I think we must take seriously Descartes’s qualification that he is only quasi created anew.91 Descartes’s main point in speaking of new creation is that God does not conserve by acting on preexisting material. Rather, he conserves by producing the being of an object ex nihilo. In this respect Descartes is simply following the Suárezian line, albeit by using language that may suggest an anti-Suárezian conclusion. Moreover, Descartes’s argument in the letter to Hyperaspistes that God annihilates only by ceasing his concursus indicates that he accepted the Suárezian view that God conserves this being by continuing the initial act by which he created it. Whatever separation

91. Or, as Descartes puts it in other texts, veluti reproduced; see Fourth Replies, AT 7:110; PP I.21, AT 8-1:13.

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there may be of distinct temporal parts, it is not a separation that requires conservation by a series of distinct creative acts.92 Though Bennett does not address this point about distinct acts, Gueroult accepts that there is for Descartes only a single indivisible creative act in God.93 But it is unclear how this single act could result in the series of distinct creations that Gueroult (anticipating Bennett) takes Descartes to posit. Since there is only one creative act, it would seem that there should be only one effect. I submit that in the case of Descartes, this single effect is simply the attribute of duration in the persisting substance. Since this attribute is not distinct in reality from the substance itself, God produces this attribute in initially producing the substance as a cause secundum esse. Conservation is just the continued production of the substance that yields the continuing presence of its attribute of duration. I have mentioned the possibility that Descartes could allow for derivative causes secundum fieri of the modes of the substances that God alone can create and conserve. Perhaps then there could be such causes of the modal features of the duration that constitute the different parts of time.94 But even if Descartes grants that there are such causes, he still must hold that they depend essentially on God’s activity as cause secundum esse. For the production of the relevant modes of duration presupposes the existence of the attribute that these modes modify. But God alone can be the cause that produces this attribute given Descartes’s claim both that the attribute is not distinct in reality from the substance to which it is attributed, and that God alone can produce the existence of the substance as a cause secundum esse. According to Descartes, then, the cause of the duration of a substance is just the same as the cause that gives that substance its existence in the first place. Here we have an endorsement of the received scholastic position in Suárez that God conserves the world by means of the very same act by which he created it. This similarity to Suárez is admittedly obscured somewhat by Descartes’s references to independent parts of time and to conservation as renewed creation. But Descartes’s view of the nature of time militates against the view that temporal parts are separated in such a way that their production requires a separate divine act. And his talk of renewed creation merely reflects his position, which Suárez had anticipated, that conservation as well as creation involves a production of being from nothing. This is why his conservation axiom says that the cause that conserves is as great as the

92. Thus I stand in opposition to Gabbey, who endorses the view in Gilson that “Descartes and Aquinas differ in their respective interpretations of God’s conservation of the world: for Aquinas the conservation is a simple continuation of the initial creative act, whereas for Descartes it is a re-creation at each (independent) instant” (Gabbey 1980, 302, n.40, citing Gilson 1925, 340–42). As indicated in the introduction, this “re-creationalist” interpretation of Descartes is found also in Smith 1902. Cf. the more recent claim in Secada 2000 that for Descartes “God initially created and then recreates at every instant all that there is” (105). 93. “And certainly, the various creations are really only one, since the creative act of God is in itself one, and since it would be inconceivable for them to be separated by intervals of time” (Gueroult 1953, 1:280). 94. Indeed, my suggestion in chapter 3 is that we can conceive of the forces that Descartes attributes to bodies in terms of such causes.

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cause that creates. And it is clear that Descartes himself takes this axiom to show that the power by which God conserves is not merely the same type as, but also tokenidentical to, the power by which he creates. This further result turns out to be central to Descartes’s argument—to be considered in the next chapter—that God conserves the total quantity not only of the substance of matter but also of the motion of its parts.

2.3. FROM AXIOMS TO CAUSATION I hope it is clear from what I have said in this chapter why I would resist saying of Descartes’s account of the causal axioms, what Bennett has said about his account of the containment axiom, that it “seems not to reflect any deeply considered views about the nature of causation.” Indeed, I think that what Descartes has to say shows that his account is backed by a rich view of causation that is profoundly conditioned by, though also departs on important matters of detail from, the scholastic account of efficient causality that Suárez articulated with great sophistication. Now, however, I want to make the more deflationary point—more congenial, perhaps, to Bennett— that Descartes’s axioms do not provide an adequate basis for attributing to him the sort of concurrentist position that Suárez offered against his competitors. This is because the axioms themselves are easily rendered compatible not only with a certain form of occasionalism, but also with a “mere conservationist” position in Durandus that was an important scholastic alternative to concurrentism. To show the conceptual flexibility of the axioms, I start with the containment axiom. I have mentioned the objection to this axiom in the literature that there is in Descartes no clear account of how causes that do not formally contain the reality of their effects can contain them eminently. In contrast, the main problem for this axiom that I have stressed concerns formal containment. Recall that this problem derives from the conclusion in the Sixth Meditation that bodies formally contain what is present objectively in our sensory ideas. Given Descartes’s emphasis in this text on the fact that bodies are often “not entirely such as” we sense them, it seems that they do not satisfy his official definition of formal containment, according to which an object is “such as we perceive.” My solution was to offer on Descartes’s behalf the view that bodies are “such as” we sense them insofar as they possess those features with which our sensory ideas are systematically correlated. Descartes assumes that causal relations between the bodily features and the ideas make this correlation possible. But it is not entirely clear that the solution requires a causal relation. For it seems that the correlations could be present even if bodies were causally inefficacious; an occasionalist could explain them, for instance, by appealing to the nature of divine action. The main point here is not that Descartes should be tempted by this occasionalist alternative. Rather, it is that showing that bodies satisfy the requirement of formal containment in the problem case of the objective reality of sensory ideas does not suffice to reveal that bodies have the power to cause this objective reality. To draw this conclusion, we must consider issues concerning the nature of body and of its connections to the mind that go beyond the containment axiom. Even if we assume that bodies have such a power, moreover, the containment axiom itself does not reveal whether the

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effect derives from this power alone, or rather, as on Suárez’s concurrentist view, requires a special divine concursus (see §1.2.3 (ii)). What needs to be sorted out here is how precisely Descartes’s suggestion that bodies are total causes of the objective reality of sensory ideas is related to his conclusion that everything derives from God as a “total and universal cause.” In contrast, the conservation axiom takes a clear stand on the nature of divine causality. In particular, this axiom requires that God’s conservation of the world involve an act that does not differ in kind from his act of creating that world. Descartes’s application of that axiom reveals further his commitment to the stronger conclusion, previously accepted by Suárez and other scholastics, that there is only a distinction in reason, and no distinction in reality, between God’s conservation of an object and his creation of that object. Whatever Descartes thought about secondary causation, then, he clearly indicated that the continued existence of the world requires that God act in a particular way as the primary cause. But though it says more about God’s causal role than the containment axiom says about the role of secondary causes, the conservation axiom is nonetheless neutral on issues regarding divine causality that were central to earlier medieval and later scholastic debates over causality. All of the main parties to these debates agreed that divine conservation is necessary for the continued existence of the created world. The differences concern the precise nature of God’s continuing causal contribution. Suárez characterized the occasionalist as arguing that since God brings a creature into existence by determining all of its features, God alone can be a real efficient cause (MD XVIII.1, ¶2, 1:593). We have seen that to avoid this occasionalist conclusion, Durandus sharply distinguished the conservation of the being of the created world from the production of changes in that world. He held that whereas God alone can bring about the former, the created powers that God conserves suffice to bring about the latter (see §1.1.3).95 However, we also know that in response to Durandus, Suárez offered the compromise position, previously proposed by Thomas, that though created powers cannot produce effects without divine assistance, God can act with those powers in a manner that allows them to make a genuine causal contribution to the effect (see §1.2.3 (ii)). In this chapter I have argued that Descartes’s claim that God is the “universal and total cause” does not preclude the view that creatures can be total causes, and thus does not rule out Suárez’s concurrentist position. But though this claim may seem to rule out Durandus’s mere conservationism, it is not evident to me that this is the case. In the passage from the letter to Elisabeth cited in §2.2.1, Descartes emphasizes that God’s universal causality differs from the universal causality of the sun, since whereas there are particular causes of the effects of the sun that are not subordinated to the sun, there are no particular causes of effects in the created world that are not subordinated to God. The notion of “subordination” could be understood in a concurrentist manner, as indicating a dependence on a divine concursus that acts with the created cause. But the notion also could be given a weaker sense that is more in line with Durandus’s mere conservationism. That is, subordination could be taken to

95. For a contemporary statement of the mere conservationist position, see Quinn 1988.

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indicate only a dependence on God’s creation/conservation of substantial being. God’s total causality extends to this kind of being as the causality of creatures does not, and since there could be no secondary causality if there were no substances, such causality depends essentially on God’s action as a cause secundum esse. But this sort of subordination does not require a concursus with the action of secondary causes that goes beyond God’s act of conservation. It thus allows for the view in Durandus that divine conservation exhausts God’s causal contribution to the production of effects by secondary causes. In terms of the Thomistic distinction we have considered at several points, the view here is that though God alone is the cause secundum esse of such effects, only the secondary causes cause them secundum fieri. The previously noted comment in Descartes’s letter to Hyperaspistes that “nothing can exist without God’s concursus” may seem to put him on the side of the concurrentists. However, it is not evident that he sharply distinguished this concursus from the divine act of conservation. Moreover, there is even the possibility of understanding the concursus in an occasionalist manner, as the exclusive locus of causal activity. On this understanding, the contributions of creatures with which God “concurs” are restricted to merely passive aspects of the causal situation. The conservation axiom alone cannot determine which of these readings is correct, since the axiom could be acceptable to occasionalists as well as to concurrentists and mere conservationists. As in the case of the containment axiom, so here we must descend from the abstract heights of the conservation axiom to Descartes’s treatment on the ground of particular kinds of causal interaction to determine whether he intended to allow for real secondary causes and, if so, how he thought such causes produce their effects. The account of the causation of motion in Descartes’s physics would seem to be a good place to start. After all, we will discover that the account that Descartes provides in the Principles relies explicitly on the consideration, connected to the conservation axiom, that God’s act of conserving the material world is identical to his initial act of creating it. Moreover, Descartes indicates the importance of the containment axiom for his account in this same text of the communication of motion when he insists there that such a account be governed by the rule “that we never attribute to a cause any effect that exceeds its capacity [potentiam]” (PP II.60, AT 8 1:76). It turns out that Descartes’s discussion in the Principles of body–body interaction provides the material for a response to the argument in the literature that he could not have taken the communication of motion to involve real bodily causes given that his spare ontology requires the reduction of matter to mere extension. But even if it is granted that Descartes rejects an occasionalist view of body–body interaction, there remains the question—which a consideration of the scholastic context of his theory of causation serves to highlight—of whether he intends to side with concurrentism against mere conservationism.

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Suárez offered a fairly luxuriant ontology of the material world, with corporeal substances composed of really distinct matter and substantial form, in which inhere the really distinct forms of quantity and various qualities along with their modifications (see §§1.2.1 and 1.3). I have noted the attempt on Descartes’s part to impose ontological austerity by identifying corporeal substance with extension and by reducing all additional features of the material world to modes of extension. Since the scholastics appealed to the various qualities and forms to provide causal explanations of change in the material world, however, Descartes’s eliminativism leaves him with the burden of providing an alternative explanation of such change. One possibility, which Daniel Garber has proposed, is that Descartes turns to God, using him “to do what substantial forms did for his teachers.” In this respect, according to Garber, Descartes is in fact “the last of the schoolmen” (Garber 1992, 305). When we turn to Descartes’s Principles, we see that he does indeed claim that God is the “universal and primary cause of motion.” However, he emphasizes in this text that there are in addition “particular and secondary causes” of motion, which he identifies with “rules or laws of nature” (PP II.36–37, AT 8-1:61–62). The immutability of God as universal and primary cause is supposed to explain the fact that the total quantity not only of matter but also of the motion and rest of its parts is conserved. In contrast, the laws as particular and secondary causes are supposed to explain why particular changes in the distribution of motion follow on collisions among these parts. In §3.1, I begin my consideration of Descartes’s account of causation in physics with his treatment in the Principles of God’s universal and primary causality. I have mentioned his view in other texts that all effects depend on God as “universal and total cause.” But in the Principles Descartes holds that the conservation of specific features of the material world follows from the immutability of God’s “ordinary concursus.” Descartes adopts the position, found also in Suárez, that the quantity of 87

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matter is constant through all natural change. However, he further defends the position, rejected by Suárez and other scholastics, that such change does not alter the total quantity of motion and rest. The discussion in the Principles focuses most on the conservation of motion, and in later correspondence with the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, Descartes develops the position that what is conserved in this case is the “force” that the quantity of motion measures.1 Though Descartes has less to say about the conservation of rest, his suggestion is that it is only the quantity of matter at rest, and not the force involved in rest, that is conserved. Thus, he cannot treat the conservation of rest in precisely the same way that he treats the conservation of motion. Even so, Descartes insists that in both cases the conservation of the total quantity follows from the premise that God’s act of conservation does not differ in reality from his initial act of creation. Drawing on my discussion of this premise in the previous chapter, I argue that Descartes ultimately takes the conservation of the various quantities to involve a continuation of God’s creation of matter with the motive force he initially infused into it. There remains the tangled problem of the ontological status of the various bodily forces that Descartes posits in his physics. In §3.2, I attempt to unravel this problem by considering the meaning of Descartes’s claim in the Principles that his three laws of nature serve as particular and secondary causes of motion. I offer a reading of this claim on which these laws are grounded in bodily forces that are themselves the causal source of changes in motion. If this reading is correct, Descartes’s considered view is that the nature of bodies is not exhausted by the purely geometric and kinematic aspects of extension. Rather, this nature consists in an extension that has a duration that serves to ground the various forces and inclinations that causally determine the particular motions that bodies possess. An understanding of force in terms of these durational tendencies reinforces the account of divine conservation considered in §3.1. For on that account God conserves the total quantity of motive force simply by creating various parts of matter with various tendencies to continue to exist that together have a constant measurable quantity. There are admittedly difficulties for an explanation of bodily force in terms of features of bodily duration, but the difficulties derive not from Descartes’s doctrine that the nature of body consists in extension, but from his account of the specific kind of force associated with the bodily state of rest. In defending this reading of Descartes’s view of body–body interaction, I side with commentators who reject an occasionalist interpretation of his physics of the sort that Garber offers. Given Descartes’s own reference to the conservation of motion and rest by means of God’s “ordinary concursus,” it is tempting to think that he models his account of the relation of divine activity to bodily causes on the main scholastic alternative to occasionalism, which appeals to God’s concurrence with the operations of secondary causes. However, I argue in §3.3 that we need to resist this temptation. A scholastic account of concurrence of the sort that we find in Suárez simply does not fit the view in the Principles of the relation between the universal

1. For a discussion devoted to Descartes’s exchange with More on this issue, see Cottingham 1997.

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and particular causes of motion. In Descartes’s text, God’s universal causation of motion is to be understood in terms not of a divine concursus that varies with the particular actions of bodily causes, but rather of God’s continuous conservation of the same total quantity of the motive forces responsible for particular changes in motion. Ultimately, Durandus’s mere conservationist position provides a more suitable model than Suárez’s concurrentism for the causal realism Descartes’s physics requires.

3.1. GOD AS UNIVERSAL AND PRIMARY CAUSE In the second part of the Principles, Descartes offers an account of motion that relies on the distinction between motion in the strict sense (motus) and the “force or action” (vis vel actio) that is the cause of motion. Whereas in earlier writings he ridiculed the attempt to define motion,2 he here takes motion, as opposed to the force that brings it about, as the “transference [translationem] of one part of matter, or one body, from the vicinity of bodies immediately contiguous to it and considered as being at rest in the vicinity of others” (PP II.25, AT 8-1:53).3 Though it has been claimed that this definition of motion is purely relativistic insofar as it does not allow for a genuine distinction between motion and rest,4 it seems fairly clear that Descartes himself recognizes such a distinction, and indeed that his account of collision in the Principles depends on it. For on the rules that this text offers, the outcomes of collisions differ in particular cases depending on whether one of the colliding bodies is in motion or at rest.5 The need for a nonrelativistic understanding of motion is even more evident given the interpretation in §3.2 of Descartes’s account of motive force.

2. See, for instance, RM XII, AT 11:426–27; To Mersenne, 16 Oct. 1639, AT 2:597. In these texts, Descartes ridicules the scholastic definition of motus as an actus entis in potentia, prout in potentia est (act of being that is in potency, insofar as it is in potency). Cf. W VII, AT 11:39. 3. Cf. his earlier view in The World that motion is that “by which bodies pass from one place [lieu] into another, successively occupying all the spaces [espaces] in between” (W VII, AT 11:40). In the Principles, Descartes intentionally avoids defining motion in terms of place, which he there distinguishes into the “internal place” (locus internus) that is identical to the extension of a part of matter and the “external place” (locus externus) that is an abstractly considered relation among parts of matter; see PP II.10 and 13, AT 8-1:45 and 47. 4. See, for instance, Blackwell 1966 and Prendergast 1972. 5. In particular, in the case where a larger body collides with a smaller body, the outcomes differ depending on whether the larger or smaller body is at rest. According to the fourth rule, in the former case the smaller body is reflected with its original speed while the larger body remains at rest, whereas according to the fifth rule, in the latter case both bodies move together in the direction of the motion of the larger body (cf. note 28). For the point that these rules are incompatible with the view that the distinction between motion and rest is arbitrary, see Garber 1992, 240–41. See also the conclusion in Blackwell 1966, 226–27, that the rules are inconsistent with Descartes’s relativistic account of motion. Whereas Blackwell takes this inconsistency to tell against the rules, I take it to tell against the attribution of such an account to Descartes.

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After the discussion in the Principles of the nature of motion as mere translatio (though, I would claim, a real bodily mode), Descartes turns to a consideration of the cause of the separation of parts of matter. He begins by noting that whereas God is the “universal and primary cause” that is responsible for “all motions in the world,” there are “particular causes” that are responsible for the fact that “singular parts of matter acquire motion they did not have previously” (PP II.36, AT 8-1:61). We know that the distinction between primary and secondary causes is a traditional one, reflected in Suárez’s distinction between a “first” principal cause that “operates altogether independently,” namely, God, and a secondary principal cause that “is dependent, even if it operates by a principal and proportionate power [virtute]” (MD XVII.2, ¶20, 1:591; see §1.2.3 (ii)). As we will discover, however, Descartes’s use of this distinction is anything but traditional. In §3.2, I consider his distinctive account of the “secondary and particular causes” of specific changes in motion. At present, though, the focus is on his understanding of the manner in which God serves as the universal and primary cause of matter as well as of its motion (and rest).

3.1.1. Universal and Total Causes In the previous chapter, I noted the claim in Descartes that God is the “universal and total cause” of everything that occurs in nature (see §2.2.1). There I defended a reading on which such a claim endorses not the occasionalist conclusion that God is the only cause of natural effects, but rather the more modest conclusion that all other causes of natural effects are essentially subordinated to God’s universal causality. This modest conclusion would have been acceptable even to someone as critical of occasionalism as Suárez, who allowed that all secondary causes depend on God’s activity as primary cause. It is perhaps tempting to think that when he refers in the Principles to the fact that God is the universal cause responsible for all motions, Descartes has in mind the fact that as in the case of all other natural effects, motions depend on God’s universal and total causality. There is indeed one significant point of contact. I indicated previously that for Descartes, God’s universal and total causality involves his exclusive production of substantial being ex nihilo. One sense in which all other causes are subordinated to God is that the activity of all such causes depends on God’s creation and conservation of this kind of being. Likewise, Descartes stresses in the Principles that by means of God’s universal causality “the world is now continuously conserved by the same action that created it then” (PP II.42, AT 8-1:66). This universal causation, like the universal and total causality that Descartes elsewhere ascribed to God, involves the divine creation/conservation of the world. Even so, it is clear from the discussion in the Principles that Descartes has in mind a thicker notion of universal causality than the notion employed in other texts. For elsewhere his claim is merely that all other effects are subordinated to God. In the Principles, however, he needs to derive the stronger conclusion that specific features of the material world are conserved. In particular, Descartes’s claim is that the universal cause of motion is

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nothing other than God himself, who in the beginning created matter at the same time with motion and rest [cum motu et quiete], and now, by his ordinary concursus [concursum ordinarium] alone, conserves the total quantity of motion and rest [motus et quietis . . . tota quantum] as he placed in it then. (PP II.36, AT 8-1:61)

The result here that there is a constant “total quantity of motion and rest” could not follow simply from the fact that these quantities derive from God’s “universal and total” causality. For all that follows from this fact is that whatever quantities there are depend essentially on God’s independent action. Nor does the fact that God is wholly immutable by itself show that the quantities are conserved. For Descartes holds that “there is always a single identical and perfectly simple act by means of which [God] simultaneously understands, wills and accomplishes everything” (PP I.23, AT 8-1:14). Since this one immutable act produces a changing temporal world, why could it not also produce changing quantities of motion and rest? What Descartes actually argues is that the conservation of the quantity of motion and rest follows not simply from the fact that God acts immutably, but rather from the further assumption that God always acts on the material world “by his ordinary concursus alone.” We will need to puzzle about the precise nature of this ordinary concursus. But first let us consider precisely what sorts of quantities this divine action is supposed to conserve.

3.1.2. Conserved Quantities In the Principles, Descartes claims that “God moved parts of matter in various ways when he first created it, and now conserves the whole of this matter in the same way and with the same plan [eademque ratione] by which he first created it” (II.36, AT 8-1:62). There are three sorts of quantities that Descartes takes to be conserved in this text: first, the total quantity of matter; second, the total quantity of motion in this world, which involves also the total quantity of the force associated with motion; and third, though not as obviously from the passage just cited, the total quantity of rest, which ultimately cannot include the force associated with rest. Let us consider these quantities in turn.

(i) Quantity of Matter Prior to his discussion in the Principles of God’s universal causation of motion, Descartes argued that there is only one kind of matter that occupies all imaginable space, and that this matter is simply extended substance itself (PP II.22, AT 8 1:52). Earlier in this text he also had noted that there is no distinction in reality between this extended substance and its quantity (PP II.9, AT 8-1:45).6 The fact that this quantity is naturally conserved follows further from Descartes’s claim that any sort of natural change in this quantity can occur only in virtue of “the divisibility and

6. Cf. the view in the Fifth Meditation that matter can be clearly and distinctly conceived only when conceived as identical to “quantity, which the common philosophers call continuous” (AT 7:63).

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mobility in respect of its parts, and its resulting capacity to be affected by all the ways that we perceive to be possible following the motion of its parts” (II.23, AT 8-1:52). So whereas quantity can be divided into different parts that can be transferred from each other in different ways, such changes in division and motion do not involve any absolute creation or annihilation of quantity itself. For reasons indicated below, I take Descartes’s claim that the quantity of matter is conserved when God acts by his ordinary concursus to indicate that it is conserved in all natural (i.e., nonmiraculous) interactions. The issue of whether such a conclusion is acceptable in a scholastic context is complicated by the fact that among the scholastics, all but the nominalists departed from Descartes’s official position that these two are distinct only by reason and not in reality.7 For scholastic realists, including Suárez, quantity is an accident that can exist apart both from the material substance composed of prime matter and substantial form, and from prime matter itself. However, most scholastics could agree that prime matter cannot be produced or destroyed by natural means. For they took this matter to be the substrate presupposed by all material processes, including the generation and corruption of material substances, and so not something that can be produced or destroyed by these processes. Among the Thomists, this argument for the conservation of prime matter could not be extended to the case of quantity. Given their view that quantity is an accident that naturally inheres in, and thus is bound to, a particular material substance, the replacement of one such substance by another (for instance, in the case where a living body becomes a corpse) involves the replacement of one quantity by a qualitatively identical but numerically distinct quantity.8 However, Suárez departs from Thomistic orthodoxy in holding that quantity inheres directly in prime matter rather than in the composite material substance.9 Moreover, he insists that quantity cannot be “per se produced de novo, or concomitantly, so that what was not now begins to be through the actions of natural agents” insofar as “quantity is coeval with matter” (MD XVIII.4, ¶3, 1:624). This is so because quantity is a “fundamental and radical property” that results directly from the being of the prime matter itself (MD XIII.14, ¶¶15–16, 1:459–60*). Despite disagreeing with Descartes’s view of the relation of quantity to material substance, then, Suárez, at least, could accept his conclusion that quantity can be neither produced nor destroyed by natural means.

7. As Suarez describes it, the nominalist position is that “bulk quantity” (quantitas molis) is “not a thing distinct from substance and material qualities. Rather, the being [entitas] of each of them by itself has that bulk and extension of parts that is in bodies; that being is called ‘matter’ insofar as it is a substantial subject, and ‘quantity’ insofar as it has extension and a distinction of parts” (MD XL.2, ¶2, 2:533*). Suárez lists as advocates of this position Peter Aureoli, Ockham, Gabriel Biel, Adam of Wodenham, John Major, and Albert of Saxony. 8. For discussion of the Thomistic position on this point, see Des Chene 1996, 146–47. 9. The main point at issue was whether prime matter has some sort of reality apart from form, as Suárez claimed, or whether such matter is purely potential and has no such reality, as the Thomists insisted; see MD XIII.4, 1:409–14*. Cf. the metaphysical differences between Suárez and the Thomists considered in §1.2.1.

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(ii) Quantity of Motion Though the result in Descartes that quantity is conserved was not entirely foreign to Suárez, there is no analogue in his thought of Descartes’s position in the Principles that the total quantity of motion remains constant in all natural change.10 Even Descartes recognizes that the case of the conservation of the quantity of motion seems to differ from the case of the conservation of the quantity of material substance insofar as motion is a mere mode and not an ultimate subject of change. He nonetheless insists that each token of the modal type of motion has a certain quantity that combines with the quantities of all the other tokens of that type to constitute a total quantity of motion “in the universe as a whole” (PP II.36, AT 8-1:61). For him, there is as good an argument for the conservation of this modal quantity as there is for the conservation of quantity as such. The Jesuit order in effect rejected the equivalence of these two cases in a formal prohibition of various Cartesian propositions that its general, Michelangelo Tamburini, issued in 1706 (Rochemonteix 1899, 4:89–93). Among the thirty condemned propositions, the tenth asserted that “in order to admit that some quantity of motion that God originally impressed on matter is lost, one would have to assume that God is changeable and inconstant,” whereas the sixteenth claimed that “there is, in the world, a precise and limited quantity of motion, which has never been augmented or diminished.” Thus it became official Jesuit doctrine that a natural change in the quantity of motion is possible, and that such a change is perfectly compatible with divine immutability. As is often the case with formal condemnations, there is room to argue that the propositions condemned do not match precisely the views of the condemned author.11 Particularly in the case of the sixteenth proposition, there are certain claims that go beyond what Descartes actually says in the Principles. For instance, Descartes never claims in that text that the total quantity of motion is “limited.” More important, he argues there not that there has been no change in the quantity of motion, but merely that there can be no such change given the assumption that God acts only by his ordinary concursus. Indeed, Descartes explicitly allows in this section of the Principles for changes in the quantity of motion “that evident experience or divine revelation renders certain” (PP II.36, AT 8-1:61). Presumably, Descartes

10. For a discussion of the novelty of Descartes’s views concerning the quantity of motion, see Dubarle 1964. But see note 25. 11. Admittedly, some of the propositions listed in the Jesuit condemnation most likely were drawn more from certain followers of Descartes than from Descartes himself. This is so, for instance, in the case of the nineteenth proposition that “only God can move bodies; angels, rational souls, and bodies themselves are not the efficient causes, but the occasional causes of motion,” and in the case of the twentieth proposition that “creatures do not produce anything as efficient causes, but God alone produces all effects, ad illarum praesentiam.” There is reason to think that Descartes was not the main target here, but rather later Cartesian occasionalists, and most especially Malebranche, who made claims very close to those found in these propositions. Even so, the seventh and sixteenth propositions seem clearly to be drawn from Descartes’s discussion in the second part of the Principles of God’s universal causation of motion.

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does not want to claim that either evident experience or divine revelation compromises divine immutability.12 Nevertheless, from a Jesuit perspective even the more modest implication in Descartes that divine immutability is incompatible with natural change in the quantity of motion is bad enough. To be sure, most Jesuit scholastics accepted the view that the circular motions of the celestial spheres are constant.13 However, such scholastics, including Suárez, insisted that sublunar motion can be corrupted by natural means.14 Indeed, on the traditional Aristotelian view this sort of corruption is inevitable given that the natural state of body is to be at rest in its proper place. Thus, all bodies naturally resist motion from such a place, and this resistance is the source of the corruption of motion. Nor, for Suárez and other scholastics, does this sort of corruption bespeak some inconstancy in God, for the change derives from the natures of the bodies that God immutably creates and conserves. There is the influential claim in the work of Pierre Duhem that the modern emphasis on the conservation of motion has its roots in scholastic thought. In particular, Duhem takes scholastic discussions of projectile motion to provide the basis for the conclusion in Descartes and other seventeenth-century mechanists that motion is conserved in all natural change (Duhem 1955, vii, 49). Aristotle claimed that the mover of the projectile imparts a portion of its motive force to the medium, with the imparted force keeping the projectile in motion until it is depleted. However, fourteenthcentury scholastics developed the view of earlier Aristotelian commentators that the mover impresses an “impetus” on the projectile itself. What Duhem emphasizes as the decisive moment on the road to the modern thesis of the conservation of motion is the proposal in the work of the scholastic master John Buridan that impetus in bodies is “something permanent by nature” (see Duhem 1955, 34–53).15 So do we not have here in the scholastics something akin to Descartes’s permanent quantity of motion? Anneliese Maier shows that we do not. In response to Duhem, she notes that Buridan proposed the permanence of impetus only in the case of celestial motion, where there is no resistance to the impetus. Buridan allowed that in the case of terrestrial motion, impetus is opposed by contrary tendencies in bodies, which later scholastics identified with natural resistance to any violent motion (Maier 1982, 89–91).16 Suárez was among those who accepted the theory of impetus, but also

12. It is true, however, that in the earlier World Descartes suggested that no change in nature can be attributed to God given the immutability of his action; see W VII, AT 11:37. For further discussion of the clause in the text from the Principles that exempts changes revealed by evident experience or divine revelation, see §4.3.3. 13. For a discussion of scholastic views on this matter, which derive from the work of Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, see Menn 1990, 218–26. 14. Thus, at one point Suárez argued that the motion of a projectile can be corrupted by the weakening of its quality of impetus due to the resisting action of the heaviness of that object (MD XXI.3, ¶27, 1:801). I discuss presently the nature of this quality. 15. The proposal, from the twelfth question of Buridan’s Questiones octavi libri physicorum, is cited in Duhem 1955, 44. 16. For the Aristotelian, violent motion is simply motion that does not have as its terminus rest in the natural place of the body that is moving.

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stressed that when an impetus is impressed on a body, “there is no requirement that it be conserved there permanently” and that “because in other respects the subject of the quality is always resisting it and its action, the nature of such a quality requires that it should stop being conserved little by little” (MD XXI.3, ¶27, 1:801).17 Descartes’s view in the Principles that the total quantity of motion cannot be altered by natural means thus involves a marked departure from the view of a scholastic such as Suárez. Descartes introduced such a view already in The World when he referred to God’s conservation of the “quantity of motions” (quantité des mouvemens) (W VII, AT 11:43), though he did not indicate there what sort of quantity he had in mind.18 By the time of the Principles, however, he settled on the view that motion is a state that has a quantity measured by the product of the size (i.e., volume) of a moving body and the scalar speed of its motion.19 The argument in this text is that not only the total quantity of matter but also the total quantity of all of the motions of its parts are conserved insofar as God acts by his ordinary concursus. Nevertheless, there is a complication for Descartes’s account of the quantity of motion that is relevant to scholastic impetus theory. For Suárez and other scholastic proponents of this theory, the impetus of a projectile is a quality that is distinct from the motion of this object insofar as it is the cause of that motion. But Descartes also seems to allow that there is more to conserved motion than its quantity. Thus he writes in 1641 that one must consider a rock that collides with the earth as having “motion, or the force to move itself [la force a se mouvoir] as a quantity that is neither augmented nor diminished” (To Mersenne, 17 Nov. 1641, AT 3:451).20 There is also the view in the 1644 Principles that there is a certain “quantum of force [quantum . . . virium], either to move, or to resist motion” (PP II.45, AT 8-1:67). Finally, Descartes claims in his 1649 correspondence with More that strictly speaking it is not the various changing modes of matter that remain constant, but only “the force impelling its parts” (vis eius partes impellente), a force that “applies itself now to one part of matter, now to another” (To More, Aug. 1649, AT 5:405).21 There is the question whether Descartes’s conserved force, like scholastic impetus, is a cause of motion that is distinct from the motion it produces. I need to

17. It is worth noting that in this passage Suárez spoke of the reduction of impetus as involving a reduction not in its quantity, but rather in its intensity (intensio). This serves to distinguish impetus from quantity strictly speaking given his official position that quantity as such cannot have intensity (MD XLI.5, ¶6, 2:601*). 18. For the suggestion that the use of the plural indicates that Descartes is thinking here that God conserves the number of motions or the number of bodies in motion, see Costabel 1967, 250–51. 19. See his claim that “if one part of matter moves twice as fast as another that is twice as large, we consider that there is the same quantity of motion in each part” (PP II.36, AT 8 1:61). Prior to this time Descartes corrected his reference in The World to the quantity of motions by speaking of a certain total quantity of all motions; see To Debeaune, 30 Apr. 1639, AT 2:543; To Mersenne, 17 Nov. 1641, AT 3:451. 20. Even earlier, he wrote in The World that “the ability [vertu] or power [puissance] to move itself that is found in body cannot entirely cease to be in the world” (W III, AT 11:11). 21. See the discussion in §3.2.1 (iii) of this passage from the More correspondence.

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postpone consideration of this question until the discussion below of his account of “secondary and particular causes.” But at least it can be said at this point that in Descartes, the measure of the total quantity of motion, namely, the sum of the products of the sizes and speeds of each moving part of matter, also serves to measure the total quantity of the force impelling these parts. Moreover, his assumption seems to be that if the total quantity of the force is conserved, then so is the total quantity of the motion associated with the force.22 Though the result that the total quantity of motion and its force are conserved is radical enough given the scholastic context, it is important to recognize how limited this result is. For instance, such a result does not by itself preclude action at a distance. As long as this kind of action does not produce an increase or decrease in the total quantity of motion, the principle of conservation is satisfied.23 Moreover, the result that quantity of force/motion is conserved says nothing about the directionality of the bodily motions. Several incompatible scenarios concerning changes in directions of bodies subsequent to collision, or even to action at a distance, seem to be consistent with this result. I do not think that Descartes himself has any illusions concerning the robustness of his conclusions regarding the conservation of motion/force. Indeed, I argue in §3.2 that he invokes particular and secondary causes precisely to underwrite claims concerning the necessity of contact action and the constraints on the direction of motion that his conservation principle alone does not yield.

(iii) Quantity of Rest In his discussion of God’s universal causality in Principles II.36, Descartes emphasizes the conservation of motion. He begins this article by referring to “the general cause of all motions that are in the world,” and he ends it by insisting that God “always conserves just as much motion in [matter]” as he created in it initially (AT 8-1:61–62). Even so, he makes a passing reference in this same article to the fact that God conserves the total quantity of rest (tota quantum quietas). Unfortunately, in contrast to the case of motion, he does not specify how the relevant quantity is to be measured. It is perhaps tempting to think that he takes the same formula that applies to the case of motion, namely, size times speed, to apply to the case of rest as well. But if we apply the formula in this way, the result of course is that the quantity of rest is nill.24

22. As Garber observes, there is the suggestion in a note from Descartes, dating perhaps from the 1630s, that the uniform application of force (vis) results in uniform acceleration (AT 11:629–30*, cited in Garber 1992, 354–55, n.17). I concur in Garber’s judgment that this suggestion is not in line with Descartes’s later account of force (though in §3.2, I provide an interpretation of this later account that differs from the one that Garber defends). 23. As Des Chene notes, Descartes’s conservation principle seems to allow for God to produce changes “that to us would look like action at a distance,” providing no reason “why bodies in motion and about to collide should not be brought to a standstill, and their motion distributed to others” (Des Chene 2000b, 149). 24. In his Search after Truth, Malebranche offers an account of rest on which it is this sort of limiting case of motion, though he does so in direct opposition to Descartes’s account of the “force of rest”; see bk. VI-2, ch. 9, Malebranche 1958–84, 2:428–29/Malebranche 1997, 515.

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A more promising proposal is that the total quantity of rest is the same as the total quantity of the parts of matter at rest. To conserve the total quantity of these parts is therefore to conserve the total quantity of their rest. On this understanding, the claim that the total quantity of rest is conserved would be simply a corollary of the doctrine of the conservation of the total quantity of matter. The clearest evidence that Descartes himself understood conservation of rest in this manner is found not in the Principles but rather in his correspondence with More. More initially asked if “matter, whether we imagine it to be eternal or created yesterday, left to itself and receiving no impulse from anything else, would move or be at rest?” (More to Descartes, 5 Mar. 1649, AT 5:316). Descartes at first ignored the question, but when More repeated it (More to Descartes, 23 July 1649, AT 5:381), he is forced to respond. Descartes writes, with respect to More’s reformulation of his query, that “I consider matter left to itself and receiving no impulse from anything else, as plainly at rest. But it is impelled by God, conserving as much motion or transference [translationem] in it as he put there from the first” (To More, Aug. 1649, AT 5:404). So the suggestion is that God produces a particular quantity of rest simply by producing a particular quantity of the matter and then “leaving it to itself.” This is in contrast to his production of a particular quantity of motion, which involves not only his producing a particular quantity of matter but also his adding to that quantity a particular amount of impulse, that is to say, force.25 So far, then, the quantity of the rest of a body seems to reduce to the quantity of the matter of that body. But there is a joker in the deck. Just as Descartes posits a force or impulse in the case of motion, so he holds that there is a force associated with rest. Thus, in a 1640 letter to Mersenne, he notes that from the fact alone that a body begins to move, it has in itself the force to continue to move [il a en soy la force de continuer à se mouvoir]; just as, from the fact alone that it is stopped in a certain place, it has the force to continue to remain there [la force de continuer à y demeurer]. (To Mersenne, 28 Oct. 1640, AT 3:213)

Later, in the Principles, he holds that the effects of bodily collisions are determined not only by a “force for acting” (vis ad agendum) in parts of matter that are in motion, but also a “force for resisting” (vis ad resistendum) that is found in any material parts in such collisions that are at rest (PP II.43, AT 8-1:66–67).26 So just as motion is not simply a mode with a certain quantity but also involves force, so, it seems, rest must involve a force in addition to its quantity. Even in the letter to More in which he suggests that God produces motion by simply producing matter without

25. The view here that motion requires a continually conserved impulse from God shows the need to qualify Dubarle’s claim that Descartes’s originality lies in his conception of motion “as a fact of the nature of the universe, no longer as an action deriving causally from a mover external to the thing moved” (Dubarle 1964, 121). Even so, I argue in §3.2 that there is a sense in which motion is grounded in something internal to the moving body (even if originally impressed and subsequently conserved there by God). I owe the point about the need for qualification, though not the more concessive point, to Garber 1992, 362, n.28. 26. In §3.2.2, I propose an account of the nature of these bodily forces.

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impulse, Descartes notes that “the resting thing, from the fact alone that it rests, has this effort [renixus], [but] this effort is not therefore rest” (To More, Aug. 1649, AT 5:403). The “effort” that Descartes mentions here, which More identified with resistance to motion,27 therefore is something that he took to be distinct from rest itself. If, as seems likely, Descartes identifies this effort with the force for resisting that he posited in the Principles, then he has good reason to distinguish it from the state of rest. For whereas he claims in this text that the total quantity of rest is conserved, it turns out that his account there of the force for resisting precludes him from holding that the quantity of this force is conserved as well. To see that Descartes cannot hold that this force is conserved, we need to consider his discussion in the Principles of the seven rules governing the effects of bodily collisions.28 The force for resisting comes into play only in the case of the fourth and sixth rules, which concern the collision of a moving body with a body at rest that is either larger than or equal in size to it.29 The suggestion in the Latin edition of this text, at least, is that this force is to be measured by the product of the resting body and the speed of the moving body that collides with it.30 Such a force is present only in the case of collision, and it ceases to exist after it has acted. In this sense, it is akin to the vis impressa that Newton later introduces in his Principia, which consists solely “in the action exerted on a body to change its states” and that “does not remain in the body after the action has ceased” (Newton 1999, 405). In contrast, the force for acting in the moving body not only acts in collision, but also maintains the body in its motion. This force therefore has aspects of Newton’s vis inertia, which explains

27. More understood Descartes to hold that “rest is an action, truly a certain effort or resistance [renixum sive resistemtiam]” (23 July 1649, AT 5:380*). 28. The original version of the seven rules is set out in the Latin edition of the Principles (PP II.46–52, AT 8-1:68–70). The rules there are as follows: the first covers the collision of bodies moving in opposite directions with equal sizes and speeds, the second covers the collision of a body with a smaller body moving in the opposite direction with the same speed, the third covers the collision of bodies moving in opposite directions with equal sizes but different speeds, the fourth covers the collision of a moving body with a larger body at rest, the fifth covers the collision of a moving body with a smaller body at rest, the sixth covers the collision of a moving body with a body at rest that is equal in size to it, and the seventh covers the collision of bodies with varying sizes or speeds that are moving in the same direction. 29. There is a much-expanded version of the rules that cover collisions involving bodies at rest (viz., the fourth, fifth, and sixth rules) in the 1647 French edition of the Principles, at AT 9-2:90–92, which was preceded by a reconsideration of such collisions that Descartes offered in a 1645 letter to Clerselier, at AT 4:183–87. For more on the evolution of Descartes’s views concerning such collisions, see Garber 1992, ch. 8. See also note 30. 30. Cf. Gabbey’s view, drawing on the version of the collision rules in the 1647 French edition of the Principles, that the force for resisting is proportional not to the speed of the moving body but rather to the quantity of motion that the resting body would receive from the moving body were the later able to impose it on the former (Gabbey 1980, 269–70). I concur in Garber’s judgment that this account of resisting force cannot be found in the original Latin edition of this text (Garber 1992, 358, n.16). Even so, I think that the points I want to make go through even on the account of the force for resisting that Gabbey attributes to Descartes (as Gabbey himself seems to recognize; see note 32).

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the fact that a body perseveres in its state (Newton 1999, 404).31 Whereas Descartes can hold that the force for acting has a quantity that is continuously conserved, he cannot say the same about the force for resisting. As I argue below, this difference reveals that the metaphysical foundations for his physics are much less amenable to forces for resisting than they are to forces for acting.32

3.1.3. Conservation and Ordinary Concursus We can now turn to the claim in the Principles that the conservation of the total quantity of matter, along with the total quantity of the motion and rest of its parts, follows from the assumption that God acts subsequent to creation “by his ordinary concursus alone” (PP II.36, AT 8-1:61). I claimed previously that the reference here to ordinary concursus indicates that there is conservation in all natural change. This implication pertains less to the fact that God acts by concursus than to the fact that this concursus is ordinary. There was a common scholastic distinction between God’s “absolute” and “ordinary” (or “ordained”) power. Drawing on the account of this distinction in Thomas, Suárez held that God’s absolute power (potentia absoluta) is his power to affect anything “apart from any respect toward the nature of things or toward other causes,” whereas his ordinary power ( potentia ordinaria) is involved in his action “according to the common laws and causes that he has established universally” (MD XXX.17, ¶32, 2:216*, citing ST I.25.5, ad 1). It is because God’s power is absolute in this way that he can miraculously produce logically possible effects that do not follow from the natures of objects in the created world. In contrast, God produces all effects that follow from these natures by means of his ordinary power. By excluding from consideration any changes in the material world guaranteed “by divine revelation” (PP II.36, AT 8-1:61), Descartes indicates as well that God’s ordinary concursus excludes miraculous action.33

31. Newton adds that inertial force explains perseverance of the body in its state quantum in se est. We will discover presently that this qualification is important for Descartes’s own conception of bodily force. 32. Cf. Gabbey’s claim that whereas “the force maintaining a moving body’s motion is the same as the force with which it resists change of direction or acts to change the state of other bodies,” the force maintaining rest must differ from resisting force, since the former “appears to have no meaningful measure analogous to that of the force maintaining motion,” but resisting force “does have a measure in terms of the motion that the striking body ‘tries’ to impart to it” (Gabbey 1980, 267–68). Though I emphasize the difficulties of accommodating resisting force within Descartes’s account of God’s conservation of motion and rest, Gabbey himself takes the collision rule that introduces this force to be “the most seminally valuable of the seven” and the force itself to take us “half-way to the fully Newtonian conception [of resisting force]” (Gabbey 1980, 269–70). 33. The further exclusion of changes guaranteed “by our own experience” most likely indicates a bracketing of changes in motions produced by finite minds. See, for instance, Descartes’s claim to Arnauld that the fact that an incorporeal mind can set body in motion is revealed “by the most certain and most evident experience [certissima & evidentissima experientia]” (29 July 1648, AT 5:222). In §4.3.3, however, I indicate that he has problems allowing for the production of a new quantity of motion by finite minds.

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The fact that a consideration of the scholastic context sheds some light on the ordinary nature of the concursus that Descartes takes to underwrite divine conservation may lead us to believe that this same context can help in the explication of his concept of concursus. After all, we know that ‘concursus’ was a scholastic term of art. I argue in §3.3 that there are in fact good reasons to resist an interpretation of Descartes’s account of God’s causation of motion in terms of a standard sort of scholastic concurrentism. However, it is worth noting here that from the perspective of a traditional scholastic concurrence theory, there are initial difficulties with aspects of his discussion of concursus.34 The structure of Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputations makes clear that divine conservation and concursus involve different aspects of the creature. Disputation XXI is devoted to the essential dependence of the being of creatures on God’s conservatio, whereas disputation XXII is devoted to the essential dependence of the operation of creatures on God’s concursus (see §1.2.3). Even though creatures could not act without God’s concursus, in Suárez’s view, they could continue to exist. He indicated that in the biblical miracle of the three men in the fiery furnace, God continued to conserve the fire but prevented it from burning the men by withholding his concursus with the action of the fire (MD XXII.1, ¶11, 1:804). To annihilate the fire, God would need to withhold not only this concursus but also the conservatio by means of which the fire remains in existence. In the article of the Principles that concerns God’s universal causation of motion, however, there is no corresponding distinction between conservatio and concursus. Descartes indicates in this article that God’s ordinary concursus is to be explicated in terms of his conservation of matter “in the same manner and according to the same reason that he first created it” (PP II.36, AT 8-1:62). Moreover, Descartes emphasizes in a later article that a portion of his third law of nature is “demonstrated by the immutability of the operation of God, now continually conserving the world by the same action with which he created it then” (PP II.42, AT 8-1:66). As indicated previously, Descartes adopts the Suárezian position that the divine conservatio is identical to God’s initial creation of an object (see §2.2.3). In suggesting that ordinary concursus is identical to God’s initial act of creation, then, he seems to indicate that it is identical as well to continued divine conservation. The identity of conservation and concursus is further reinforced by Descartes’s remarks on concurrence outside of the Principles.35 Thus, in a 1641 letter to

34. Cf. the claim of J. A. van Ruler that “the fact of Descartes’ commitment to the scholastic concept [of concurrence] cannot conceal the ambiguous way in which he uses it” (Ruler 1995, 271). 35. Here I draw on the argument in Ruler 1995, 271–78. Cf. the response to this argument in Pessin 2003, 36–39. But though Pessin is correct that Descartes sometimes used the term ‘concursus’ when speaking of causal contributions of partial causes that do not involve conservation (e.g., in the Fourth Meditation, at AT 7:50 and 56), his point that Descartes linked divine concursus to the laws of nature does not seem to me to establish a concurrentist reading of his account of God’s causation of motion (see note 88). I take this same point to apply to the different version of concurrentism attributed to Descartes in Hattab 2000 and 2007 (see note 73). In §3.3, I argue more explicitly against the view that Descartes’s physics can be explicated in terms of scholastic concurrentism.

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Mersenne, he protests that he never held that “God does not concur immediately [concourt immediatement] in all things,” and notes that he even “expressly asserted the contrary” in his response to the theologian Caterus (To Mersenne, 21 Apr. 1641, AT 3:360). But this response, from the First Replies, explicitly concerns the conservation axiom discussed in the previous chapter. In the Replies Descartes repeats the conclusion in the Third Meditation that he could not continue to exist “unless some cause as it were causes anew [quasi rursus efficiat] at each moment” and adds that “I do not hesitate in calling this cause, which conserves me, efficient” (AT 7:109). Given this background information, we are to take the “immediate concourse” that Descartes mentions in his letter to Mersenne to be a continued conservation of the world that is identical to the efficient causal act by which God initially created it.36 Descartes suggests the identification of concursus with conservation as well in passages that concern the nature of substance. In the Synopsis to the Meditations, he notes that all created substances “are by their nature incorruptible, and cannot ever cease to be unless they are reduced to nothing by God denying his concursus to them” (AT 7:14). The implication here is that the divine concursus is not only necessary but also sufficient for the continued existence of created substances. The claim concerning the necessity of the concurrence is picked up in the Latin edition of the Principles, where Descartes claims that whereas God is substance in the primary sense since he “depends on no other thing to exist,” created substances “cannot exist unless by the work of the concursus of God” (PP I.51, AT 8-1:24). However, the claim concerning sufficiency is reflected in the comment added in the later French edition of this text that created substances “need only the ordinary concourse [concours ordinaire] of God” to exist (AT 9-2:47). We do not have to speculate that the use of the notion of concursus in these passages would have been objectionable to those with a scholastic sensibility. One of Descartes’s Dutch critics, Jacobus Revius, the author of Suarez repurgatus,37 took issue with the remarks concerning substance in the Principles when he announced in a 1650 text that “I am ashamed for the love of God, I am ashamed about your ignorance, Descartes. That such a great philosopher as yourself has not learned to distinguish between conservation and concursus!”38 Revius made what for scholastics would be the crucial point that an object that is nothing apart from the divine act of conservation cannot be said to concur in that act.39 In the scholastic view, creatures concur not in the conservation of their substantial existence, which

36. See also Descartes’s repeated reference to God’s concursus in his discussion of divine conservation in To Hyperaspistes, Aug. 1641, AT 3:429–30. 37. See Revius 1643. In this text, Revius attempted to present a Suárezian system purged of what to his Calvinist sensibility was Suárez’s own “pelagian” emphasis on our freedom to reject divine grace. 38. From Revius’s Statera philosophiae cartesianae (Revius 1650), cited in Ruler 1995, 276. Here I follow Ruler’s translation. For an overview of Revius’s critique of Descartes’s system, see Verbeek 1992, 40–46, 78–81. 39. See the passage from Revius 1650, 73, cited in Ruler 1995, 277, n.51.

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God alone brings about,40 but only in the production of their effects, to which their operations contribute. Revius also raised the question of how Descartes could speak of concursus at all in the context of his physics given that there can be no vis agendi in his world of mere extension, and so no “acting with” in the case of bodies.41 Such a question of course broaches the issue of Descartes’s views on the efficacy of secondary and particular causes, an issue that I will address in §3.2. At this point, though, it is worth considering why Descartes would even use the language of concursus when discussing matters pertaining to conservation. One answer suggested by the text of the Principles is that what God contributes to body–body interaction is the conservation of the total quantity both of the matter of the parts that compose the material world and of the motion of these parts. This contribution therefore goes beyond the mere conservation of the quantity of matter, and so in this sense can be said to involve an additional concursus. However, this concursus is nothing beyond the act of conserving the total quantity of motion, an act that is identical to the act by which God created this quantity ex nihilo. It is important to distinguish this suggestion of the identity of concursus with creation of motion from what Garber has called the “cinematic view” of God’s causation of motion.42 As Garber describes it, such a view holds that “motion is simply the divine recreation of bodies in different places with respect to one another in different moments; God, on this view, moves bodies by his recreation alone” (Garber 1992, 275). Though others, such as Gueroult, attribute the cinematic view to Descartes, Garber is careful to note that such a view is something to which Descartes never explicitly commits himself (Garber 1992, 275–76).43 On the basis of my earlier argument against Gueroult (see §2.2), I think we can go further by claiming that Descartes in fact rejects the view of divine conservation as continual re-creation and offers in its place the more traditional position that such conservation consists in the continuation of the initial act of creation. But an additional point is that the identification of divine concursus with conservation of matter in motion need not entail the lack of a distinction between the creation of matter simpliciter and the causation of its motion. In the Principles itself, Descartes emphasizes that God not only originally created a certain quantity of matter but also “moved the parts of matter diversely, when he first created them” (PP II.36, AT 8-1:62). The divine concursus to changes in motion consists in a continuation of God’s act not only of creating the

40. Suárez allowed that certain accidents can depend on secondary causes for their conservation (as light depends on the sun, or motion on a mover), but concluded that God alone can immediately conserve a sort of being that can be created only ex nihilo; see MD XXI.3, 1:794–801. As indicated in §1.2.3 (i), however, Suárez acknowledged the difficulty in providing a demonstration that God cannot communicate to creatures a derivative sort of power to create ex nihilo. 41. Again from Revius 1650, 73, cited in Ruler 1995, 277. 42. Following Bergson, who labels this the conception cinématographique of motion; see Bergson 1907, 295, 356, 373, cited in Gueroult 1953, 1:274. 43. Though Garber does say that “it is quite possible that the cinematic view is a correct representation of [Descartes’s] thought in The World or the Principles” (Garber 1992, 276).

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matter, but also of initially moving its parts.44 In contrast, on the cinematic view the difference between these two acts can be revealed not in the initial moment of creation but only at later moments, when material parts are re-created either with the same relations of distance or different relations. Though Garber himself is skeptical that we can find any clear repudiation of the cinematic view in the Principles, he takes such a repudiation to emerge in Descartes’s late correspondence with More. On the account that Garber finds in this correspondence, which he calls the “impulse view,” God’s causation of motion consists not in his conservation of matter, but rather in his producing a “divine shove” that serves to impel matter (Garber 1992, 278). Garber finds such a view to be indicated in the remark in an August 1649 letter to More, cited previously, that though matter is at rest when it is “left to itself ” and receives “no impulse from anything else,” in fact it has been “impelled by God, conserving as much motion or transference in it as he put there from the first” (AT 5:404). The divine shove is simply that by which God introduced motion in the first place, and to conserve this motion he merely needs to keep shoving. One reason to take the impulse view to depart from the Principles is that it seems to distinguish God’s causation of motion more radically than this text does from his creation/conservation of the material world. Garber explains this difference in terms of the distinction between causes that produce the modes of a thing, or “modal causes,” and causes that produce the substantial being of a thing, or “substantial causes” (Garber 1992, 277). The suggestion in the Principles is that God’s activity as a substantial cause in creating and conserving the material world also explains his conservation of the total quantity of motion. As Garber sees it, however, the view in the More correspondence is that God acts merely as a modal cause in initially impelling matter and in conserving this impulse. As evidence that Descartes thought in his later writings that God is merely a modal cause of motion, Garber cites his claim in an April 1649 letter to More that although I believe that no mode of acting belongs univocally to God and creatures, I confess, however, that I can find no idea in my mind that represents the mode by which God or an angel can move matter different from that which exhibits to me the mode by which I am conscious that I can move my own body through my thought. (AT 5:347)

In moving our body, it seems evident that we act as a modal and not a substantial cause. But if we do not conceive of the mode of God’s action in moving matter as differing from the mode of our action in moving our body, then it would seem that we must conceive of God as moving matter as a modal rather than a substantial cause. Garber conclusion is that on Descartes’s view in the More correspondence, “there would appear to be a distinction between God as sustainer of the world, as a substantial cause, keeping things in existence, and God as cause of motion, a modal cause, causing bodies to have the particular motion they have, determining, at least in part, their modes” (Garber 1992, 277).

44. Of course, Descartes’s official view is that there is a single act of creation here. However, the point is that in the cases of creating matter without motion and creating matter with motion, the acts must differ given the differences in the objects.

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It can be noted initially, in response to Garber’s claim here, that Descartes prefaces his April 1649 remark to More by saying that “it is not a defect for a philosopher to hold that God can move body, even though he does not hold that God is corporeal; so also it is not a defect to judge the same of other incorporeal substances” (AT 5:347). It seems that Descartes’s main concern in comparing the conception of the way we move bodies to the way God does is to counter the position that God could move bodies only if he were corporeal. But we also need to take seriously his warning in this passage that “no mode of acting belongs univocally to God and creatures.” Even if we as well as God move by an impulse of some kind, it must be recognized that both the effect of the impulse and its causal source are very different in the two cases. Descartes suggests in his correspondence with Elisabeth that we have a primitive notion of the union of mind and body “on which depends [our idea] of the force [force] that our soul has to move the body” (21 May 1643, AT 3:665).45 But as Descartes admits to More, this force must differ from the sort of force involved in God’s causation of motion. Our force is a mere mode of our mind, whereas there can be no modes in God (Aug. 1649, AT 5:404).46 In addition, Descartes notes in this same letter, in a passage cited earlier, that it follows from “the laws proposed in articles 45 and following of the Second Part” of the Principles that God moves body by conserving “the force impelling its parts, which force applies itself now to one part of matter, now to another” (AT 5:405). However it is that we move our body, it surely is not the case that we act by continuing to conserve the force we originally placed in it. We can understand the distinction here between the cases of God and finite minds in terms of the familiar Thomistic distinction between causes secundum fieri and secundum esse. I have noted the claim in Descartes that God alone can be the cause secundum esse of substances. But whereas finite minds could perhaps be causes secundum fieri of certain changes in motion, God himself cannot be characterized as such a cause, principally because he is not a cause of change. Rather, he is the cause of a constant quantity of motive force in the world. So though motive quantity is a mode, God can be considered as the cause secundum esse of this quantity insofar as he creates/conserves a quantity that is the subject of various modifications.47 In §4.3, I consider Descartes’s account of the forces in finite minds that account for changes in the material world. What is relevant here, however, is his conception of the various bodily forces that he posits in his physics. With respect to such forces, there would seem to be only three options: either these forces exist in bodies, or they

45. For further discussion of Descartes’s account of the union and its primitive notion, see §4.1. 46. This view follows from the claim in the Principles that since “no variation is intelligible in him,” God can possess only invariable attributes and no variable modes (PP I.56, AT 8-1:26). 47. In his 1704 Use of Reason (see chapter 1, note 77), the Cartesian Regis claims that God “produces the substance of formal motion,” whereas “the modes of this motion . . . depend immediately on creatures” (I-2.15, Regis 1996, 296). Though Regis’s account of the production of motion is idiosyncratic in certain respects (see note 87), he allows for the basic view, which I find in Descartes, that God does not produce motion in the way in which other causes do.

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exist in God, or they do not exist at all.48 The claim that they exist in God is presumably ruled out by the fact that the various forces for acting and for resisting posited in the Principles vary, whereas again, as Descartes emphasizes to More, there can be no variation in God. But the claim that the varying forces exist in bodies seems to involve an appeal to something akin to the scholastic forms and qualities that Descartes wanted to banish from his physics. This would seem to leave us with the last option, which Garber attributes to Descartes, that “force is nowhere, strictly speaking, not in God, who is the real cause of motion in the inanimate world, and not in bodies, which are the recipients of the motion that God causes” (Garber 1992, 298).49 To determine Descartes’s own intentions with respect to this issue, we need to reflect on his account in the Principles of the ways in which “secondary and particular causes” contribute to God’s universal causation of motion. I take this account to support a version of the first option, namely, that variable forces exist in bodies. Here I draw on the view in the seminal work of Gueroult and Gabbey that the bodily forces that Descartes posits in this text are to be understood in terms of the existence or duration of the bodies that God continuously conserves.50 In contrast to these commentators, however, I explicate the differences among bodily forces in terms of the differences among the modes of the duration of the bodies that possess the forces. Moreover, my position is distinctive in emphasizing that an account of bodily force in terms of duration better accommodates the forces for acting in moving bodies than it does the forces for resisting in resting bodies. I do not take this problem with forces for resisting to constitute an objection to my interpretation of Descartes since—as will become clear—I think that such forces are not easily incorporated into his own view in the Principles of the ordinary concursus involved in God’s continued creation of the material world.

3.2. LAWS AS PARTICULAR AND SECONDARY CAUSES Descartes’s claim in the Principles that “rules or laws of nature” (regulae sive leges naturae) are “particular and secondary causes” no doubt strikes the contemporary reader as odd. From our post-Humean perspective such rules or laws would seem to be mere

48. As I indicate presently, Gueroult and Gabbey are the main representatives of the position that Descartes takes the first option, whereas Garber is the main representative of the position that he accepts the third option. The second option is often attributed to Hatfield on the basis of his discussion in Hatfield 1979, but he has indicated to me in conversation that when he said that force is in God, he meant only that God is the sole efficacious cause in body–body interactions, and not that varying forces are literally in God. Hatfield’s account of his original intent is reinforced by the discussion of his position in Garber 1992, 636–37, n. 41. 49. See also the view in Des Chene 1996, which he presents as a reconciliation of the first and third options, but which I take to be a variant of the third, on the basis of his claim that “if by ‘force’ one means a mode whose intensity would be measured by the quantity Mv (in a moving body), then there is no such thing” (Des Chene 1996, 340). 50. Cf. Gueroult 1980, 198, and Gabbey 1980, 253–58.

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empirical generalizations, hardly the sort of thing that could serve as a cause. One question that we need to address, then, is what Descartes could mean when he speaks of rules or laws as causes. Yet there is a further puzzle concerning the relation of the laws to God’s action as the universal and primary cause of motion. As we have seen, this divine action consists in the conservation of the total quantity of motive force by means of the continuation of God’s initial act of creating the material world. But in the Principles, only the third law of nature, concerning the distribution of motion subsequent to collision, is derived explicitly from God’s action as primary cause of motion. The first law, which requires the conservation of the state of an object quantum in se est, is not restricted to the case of motion, and the second law, which concerns the rectilinear determination of motion, does not concern the quantity of motion at all.51 It turns out that the heterogeneity of the three laws cannot be eliminated entirely. It also is the case that the third law of motion reveals most directly Descartes’s view of the nature of the particular causes of motion; indeed, we will discover that this law introduces some interesting complications for his containment axiom in the Third Meditation. Even so, a closer consideration of each of the three laws will put us in a better position to understand why Descartes takes all of them to be grounded in the divine conservation of the material world.

3.2.1. Three Laws of Nature (i) Perseveret quantum in se est In the article of the Principles that follows the one in which he discussed God’s activity as primary cause of motion, Descartes offers the following as the first of the three laws of nature that serve as particular and secondary causes of motion: [E]ach and every thing, insofar as it is simple and undivided, remains, insofar as it has it in itself, always in the same state, and never changes unless by external causes [unamquamque rem, quantus est simplex et indivisa, manere, quantum in se est, in eodem semper statu, nec unquam mutari nisi à causeis externis]. (PP II.37, AT 8-1:62)

This law has an earlier counterpart in The World. In this text, Descartes introduces the law that “each part of matter, in particular [chaque partie de la materiere, en particulier], continues always to be in the same state, so long as its encounter [le rencontre] with others does not force it to change” (W VII, AT 11:38). This law itself derives from Descartes’s early work on free fall. Thus, he notes in a 1629 letter to Mersenne that he will try to demonstrate the principle that “what is once in motion will, in a vacuum, always remain in motion” in his “treatise,” presumably, The World (18 Dec. 1629, AT 1:90).52 But what is found in The World, as well as the Principles, is not a law restricted to motion, but one that applies to any state of a “part of matter in particular” or to a “thing, insofar as it is simple and undivided.”

51. I am indebted here to the clear statement of this problem in Des Chene 2000b, 153, n.5. 52. The principle itself dates from a 1618 note on free fall that Descartes wrote for Beeckman, in which he claims that “in a vacuum, what is once moved always moves” (AT 10:78*).

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It is difficult to know whether it was significant for Descartes that the later formulation of his law applies to any res, and not just to material parts. Though the suggestion in the Principles is that the law applies to minds as well as to matter, to my knowledge Descartes never discussed its applicability to the case of mind, which surely for him is a simple and undivided object.53 We will discover in chapter 5, moreover, that he allowed that the mind can be a cause of changes in its internal states through acts of will. It is not clear how such immanent action could be consistent with the requirement that even minds will persist in their states unless altered by external causes.54 For our purposes here, we can ignore the broader scope of the version of the first law in the Principles and apply it only to the case of bodies. But what can it mean to say that bodies are “simple and undivided” things? Here the simplicity cannot be the same as the simplicity of mind given Descartes’s view that any body is divisible, as no mind is, into really distinct parts. However, it is significant that he says in the Principles only that the thing is undivided, and not that it is indivisible. In this text he distinguished between the division of a body into parts that “occurs simply in our thought” and its division into parts by means of actual motions (PP II.23, AT 8-1:52–53). The simplicity of the bodies that the first law concerns would not be the metaphysical simplicity that the mind has in virtue of lacking any really distinct parts, but only the physical simplicity of a body that lacks any internal parts distinguished by motions. Such a body has no actual internal complexity to compromise its tendency to persist in its state quantum in se est. Descartes refers in Principles II.36 to the fact that particular causes bring it about that “singular parts of matter acquire motion they did not have previously” (AT 8 1:61). With respect to the first law, however, the focus is not on the external cause of a bodily state, but rather on the internal source of the persistence in that state.55 This is indicated by the appeal in the first law to persistence quantum in se est. As I. B. Cohen has shown, this phrase, which has a long history dating back to

53. On the indivisibility and simplicity of mind, see the Sixth Meditation, at AT 7:85–86, and PS I.47, AT 11:364–66. 54. For more on this issue, see chapter 5, note 42. Interestingly, later Cartesians held that even in the cases of minds, changes in state require an external cause. A case in point is provided by an exchange between Regis and his critic Jean Du Hamel. In response to the axiom in Regis’s 1691 System of Philosophy (Système de philosophie) that “each thing persists in itself to remain in the state it is in,” the Paris academic Jean Du Hamel objected that we know by faith that angels “turn themselves, some toward the good, others toward evil” (Du Hamel 1692, 56). Regis rejoined that the axiom holds even in the case of mind, since all changes in will derive from changes in intellect, and since there can be changes in intellect only if the mind is acted on by a body to which it is united (Regis 1692, 28–29). Regis was following the view here of the French Cartesian Robert Desgabets that any “pure mind” not united to any body must think “indivisibly and irrevocably.” For further discussion of this position in Desgabets and of its relation to Regis’s views, see Schmaltz 2002a, ch. 4. 55. See Spinoza’s helpful gloss on this passage in Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy (Renati Descartes Principiorum Philosophiae Pars I et II ): “[I]f we attend to no external, i.e., particular causes, but consider the thing by itself, we shall have to affirm that insofar as it can it always perseveres in the state in which it is” (IIp14dem, Spinoza 1985, 277).

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Lucretius, was often understood as being equivalent to sua sponte, ex natura sua, and sui vi, that is, from the internal power or nature of a thing (Cohen 1964, 148). So the main claim in the first law is that there is something in an object, in est, that explains the fact that that object persists in its state. There is the derivative claim that such persistence holds except in the case of changes due to “external causes.” However, nothing is said about how such causes operate. It is consistent with the first law, as expressed in the Latin edition of the Principles, that the causes bring about their changes through action at a distance. The counterpart of this law in The World may seem to preclude this option when it refers to changes forced by an “encounter” (le rencontre) with other parts of matter. But it is not clear how from the result that an unimpeded body continues in its same state that only an impediment that involves actual contact can produce a change in that state.56 As in the case of God’s universal causality, so the particular internal cause of persistence does not require by itself that body–body interaction take place only by means of contact action. This requirement in fact depends on further considerations introduced by the other two laws of nature.

(ii) Motus ex se ipso rectus In Principles II.39, Descartes summarizes his second law of nature as follows: [E]ach and every part of matter, taken separately, never tends to move so that it perseveres according to oblique lines, but only according to straight lines [unamquamque partem materiae, seorsim spectatem, non tendere unquam ut secundùm ullas lineas oliquas pergat moveri, sed tantummodo secundum rectas]. (AT 8-1:63)

This law seems to be connected to Descartes’s investigations during the late 1620s of the nature of the propagation of light.57 But whereas one can find formulations of the first law that predate The World, the second law is introduced in that text, though as the third of the three laws (for reasons I indicate below). In The World, it is said that when a body moves even though its motion is made most often along a curved line, and even though it can never make any that is not in some manner circular, as was said earlier, still each of its parts in particular tends always to continue its [motion] in a straight line. And thus their action, that is to say the inclination [l’inclination] that they have to move, is different from their motion. (W VII, AT 11:43–44.)

56. In the French edition of the Principles, the reference in the Latin edition to being changed “by external causes “by external causes” (a causis externis) is replaced by the reference to being changed “by encounter with others” (par la rencontre des autres) (PP II.37, AT 9-2, 84). But though this change brings the position in this text into line with what Descartes said in the World, there is no more of a justification here than in that earlier text for the limitation to collision. 57. As proposed in Garber 1992, 210. In the early unfinished Rules for the Direction of the Mind (abandoned in 1628), there is an appeal to “the nature of light” with respect to the problem of how light passes through a transparent body (RM VIII, AT 11:394–95). Later, in the Dioptrics (1637), Descartes emphasizes that rays of light must be held to be propagated in a straight line when they pass through a uniform and transparent body (AT 6:88–89). Finally, Descartes applies the second law explicitly to the case of the propagation of light in the Principles (PP III.55, AT 8-1:108).

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In both The World and the Principles, there is an emphasis on the fact that a moving body has a tendency to move in a straight line even in the case where it is always constrained to move along a curved line. In the earlier work, Descartes takes this fact to show that the “action or inclination” that bodies have to move (l’action, c’est à dire l’inclination qu’elles ont à se mouvoir) differs from the motion itself. Even in the case of circular motion, the body has an inclination at each instant (instant) to have the simplest motion, namely, motion in a straight line (AT 11:44–45). The distinction between motion and inclination at an instant is also present in the Principles, where Descartes notes that although no motion takes place in a single instant (in singularis instantibus), still at each instant the moving body “is determined to continue its motion [determinatum esse ad motum suum continandum] toward another part according to a straight line” (PP II.39, AT 8-1:64). The language in the Principles is a bit confusing, since the sort of determination referred to here differs from the determination of motion in a certain direction that is important to the third law of nature in that text (see PP II.41, AT 8-1:65–66). Descartes holds that this latter sort of determination is a modification of an actual motion (see To Mersenne for Hobbes, 21 Apr. 1641, AT 3:355–56). In contrast, the instantaneous determination to motion, or what he calls in The World the inclination to motion, is not a mode of motion but only a “first preparation for motion” that can be present even in something, such as the pressure of light, that does not involve actual motion (PP III.63, AT 8-1:14). In The World, Descartes argues that since at each instant God can conserve only the inclination to motion that is present at that instant, and since it is only the inclination to move in a straight line “that is entirely simple, and the whole nature of which is comprised in an instant,” God must conserve at each instant the inclination to move in a straight line (W VII, AT 11:44–45). His later claim in the Principles is that God’s immutable and simple action can conserve nothing “unless in the precise form it is at the moment of time that he conserves it” (PP II.39, AT 8-1:64). Dennis Des Chene takes this claim to deviate from the position in The World insofar as it attributes the simplicity to the divine operation rather than to the motion itself (Des Chene 1996, 283–84). However, the view in the Principles that God conserves motion “in the precise form it is at the moment he conserves it” indicates that the form intrinsic to the motion at an instant involves the inclination to rectilinear motion. The argument here, consistent with that in The World, is that since at each instant motion can have only the inclination “the whole nature of which is comprised in an instant,” and since only the inclination to rectilinear motion has such a nature, a simple and immutable divine concursus can result only in the conservation at each instant of the inclination to rectilinear motion.58

58. It might be thought that Descartes’s remarks here favor the view of Gueroult, criticized in §2.2, that God conserves the world by re-creating it at each instant. But Descartes himself indicates that the fact that moving bodies have durations composed of instants “does not interrupt the continuity of their motions” (PP III.63, AT 8-1:115). For God to conserve the rectilinear inclination of a motion at an instant is just for him continuously to conserve the motion that has such an instantaneous inclination. Thanks to Andy Pessin for pressing me on this point.

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I leave for §3.2.3 a consideration of the assumptions in this argument regarding the simplicity and immutability of the divine concursus. For now, I want to consider the claim that rectilinear motion itself is the simplest in form. Such a claim went against the traditional Aristotelian position—which influenced even critics of Aristotelianism such as Galileo—that circular motion is the most basic found in nature.59 In the Principles, Descartes’s argument against this position relies on the assumption that only the inclination to rectilinear motion can be comprised in an instant, since any other inclination requires a comparison to motion “that was a little while earlier” (PP II.39, AT 8-1:64). If a point lies on a curved path, one needs information about previous (and subsequent) points on the path to determine its nature. But in the case of a straight path from a point, any direction of the path from that point will yield such a line.60 Just as the first law emphasizes what follows from an object quantum in se est, so the second law focuses on the results of an instantaneous inclination internal to motion itself. As I have noted, however, the first law had little to say about the external causes that disrupt persistence. We are now in a position to see the implication of the second law that in the case of bodies, at least, only something that blocks the path of a moving body could frustrate the inclination to rectilinear motion. The rejection here of any change in motion produced by action at a distance is even clearer in the case of Descartes’s third law.

(iii) Quantum motus transfert In Principles II.40, Descartes offers the following as the third law of nature: [W]here a body that moves encounters another, if it has less force for persevering according to a straight line than this other has to resist it, then it is deflected in another direction, and, retaining its motion, gives up only its determination [to continue its motion in a particular direction]; but if it has more, then it moves the other body with it, and whatever it gives of its motion to [the other body] it loses just as much [ubi corpus quod movetur alteri occurrit, si minorem habeat vim ad pergendum secundum lineam rectam, quàm hoc alterum ad ei resistendum, tunc deflectitur in aliam partem, & motum suum retinendo solam motûs

59. Aristotle’s argument in De Caelo is that since the simplest bodies have the most perfect motion, and since circular motion is the most perfect insofar as it has a starting point that is identical to its ending point, and so is complete in itself, circular motion is natural for the simplest bodies (I.2, a17–30, Aristotle 1984, 1:448–49). In the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo Sopra i Due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo) Galileo’s spokesman Salviati attacks the Aristotelian view of the rectilinear motion of the elements by insisting that uniform circular motion is most natural to terrestrial objects, since they share in the Earth’s rotation (Galileo 1967, 28, 148). Even Descartes’s Dutch mentor Beeckman, who was a critic of Aristotelian physics, argued that motion along a curved path continues along this path if unimpeded, just as unimpeded motion along a straight path continues along that path (Beeckman 1939, 1:253). 60. My summary of Descartes’s argument here has been influenced by the discussion in Des Chene 1996, 283–86. But see also the reservations concerning Des Chene’s reading indicated in the previous paragraph.

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determinationem amitti; si verò habeat majorem, tunc alterum corpus secum movet, ac quantum ei dat de suo motu, tantundem perdit]. (AT 8-1:65)

In contrast to the first two laws, this law directly concerns the case where a body brings it about that “singular parts of matter acquire motion they did not have previously,” and so serves as a particular cause in the sense defined in Principles II.36. What is central here to the causality of colliding bodies is either the force for resisting that produces a change in the determination of motion, or the force for acting that produces a redistribution of motion. The reference to the determination of the motion in a certain direction explains why this law is presented in the Principles after the second law. For though I have indicated that the instantaneous inclination to motion to which the latter refers must be distinguished from the determination that modifies motion, this determination nonetheless derives from that inclination. It is in virtue of that inclination, after all, that an unimpeded moving body is determined to move along a straight path. The counterpart of the third law in The World, however, makes no mention of determination. There the law is simply that “when a body pushes another it can give it no motion without losing as much of its own; nor take away any without augmenting its own by the same amount” (W VII, AT 11:41). This is the second law in that text, presented before the law concerning the inclination to rectilinear motion. And it could be so presented, since, in contrast to the case of the third law in the Principles, it refers only to the quantity of motion and not to its directionality. As I indicated previously, the Principles also differs from The World insofar as it relies on a specific measure of the quantity of motion (see §3.1.2 (ii)). It follows from the account in the former text of God’s action as universal cause that there is a global conservation of the quantity of motion. What the third law adds is that this quantity is locally conserved in cases of collision. Since this law is supposed to govern “all the particular causes of changes that happen to bodies, . . . at least those which themselves are corporeal,”61 it follows from conservation of the quantity of motion in cases of collision that particular causes do not bring about a change in the total quantity of motion. Even so, both The World and the Principles include an appeal to bodily forces in the explanation of transfers of motion in collision. The suggestion in the earlier work that bodies “retain or transfer [motions] one to another, as they have the force [ force] to do so” (W VII, AT 11:43) becomes the more specific position in the later text that a resting body has a “force for resisting” (vis ad resistendum) that inclines it toward “persevering in its state of rest,” whereas a moving body has a “force for acting” (vis ad agendum) that is responsible for its tendency “for persevering in its motion, that is, in motion with the same speed and toward the same part” (PP II.43, AT

61. The Cottingham translation has this passage say that the third law “covers all changes which are themselves corporeal” (Descartes 1984–85, 1:242), thereby taking the changes rather than the causes to be corporeal. Though the Latin is ambiguous on this point, it would not seem to be necessary to emphasize that a law concerning changes in motion governs only corporeal changes. For a criticism of the Cottingham translation along these lines, see Della Rocca 1999, 52–54.

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8 1:66–67). According to the third law in the Principles, these forces are supposed to explain the redistributions of motion that occur in collision. The claim in the Principles that the third law governs all particular causes that are corporeal, coupled with the claim there that such causes produce changes only in the case of collision, yields the further result that all body–body interaction occurs by means of contact action. Thus the third law makes explicit, what was merely implicit in the second law, that no corporeal causes can produce changes in motion at a distance.62 We have discussed the requirement in Descartes that an efficient cause must be simultaneous with its effect, since it cannot act at a time distant from that of its action (see §2.2.1). Now we have the requirement that in the case of particular bodily causes, at least, an efficient cause must be contiguous with body it acts on, since it cannot act at a place distant from that action.63 Both the third law in the Principles and its counterpart in The World suggest the further requirement that a particular corporeal cause acts by “giving” to its effect a portion of its quantity of motion that it “loses.” We seem to have here an endorsement of what Janet Broughton has called “the migration theory of motion,” according to which motion is transferred in collision by means of the migration of a particular mode of motion from one body to another. Broughton’s proposal is that Descartes was led to this theory by the fact that the containment axiom from the Third Meditation requires that in cases of formal containment, the cause not only contains something similar to what is found in the effect, but also imparts the very same thing it formally contains to its effect (Broughton 1986, 120–21). If Descartes’s containment axiom required the migration theory of motion, there would be good reason to challenge his claim that such an axiom is revealed to be evident by the “natural light” (AT 7:40).64 But though there is no doubt that Descartes’s language in certain texts clearly suggests such a theory,65 it is not evident 62. Cf. the discussion of Descartes’s rejection of action at a distance in Suppes 1954. Here I agree with Suppes’ conclusion that Descartes has a priori grounds for restricting body–body interaction to contact action, though my account of Descartes’s derivation of the restriction goes beyond what is found in his article. Cf. Clarke’s argument that Descartes did not derive his laws of nature from metaphysical principles (Clarke 1982, 100–104). In contrast to Clarke, however, I take Descartes’s appeals to experience in his discussion of the laws to be an attempt to illustrate rather than to justify the laws. 63. In §4.3.2, we will consider whether Descartes held that some version of the requirement of contiguity applies to the case of mind-to-body action. 64. For the suggestion that Descartes’s containment principle requires a “transmission” view of causation, see Lloyd 1976. Bennett objects to Descartes’s treatment of the containment axiom (or what he calls the “causal resources principle”) on the grounds that it equivocates between the unacceptably strong view of “causing as giving” and the trivial view of a cause as having the power to produce its effect (Bennett 2001, 1:88–89). I argued in the previous chapter that there is more to Descartes’s axiom than this trivial view. Presently I argue that this axiom does not require an implausible version of the strong view. 65. Besides the passages already cited, see the claim in The World that “the virtue or power to move itself, which is found in a body, can well pass wholly or in part into another [passer toute ou partie dans un autre], and thus no longer be in the first, but it cannot no longer be at all in the world” (W III, AT 11:11).

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that his containment axiom requires it. With respect to this last point, it is worth considering the case of Suárez. As I noted in the previous chapter, Suárez accepted a version of Descartes’s containment axiom. Yet we also saw in the first chapter his emphasis on the fact that an efficient cause is “extrinsic” insofar as it produces in the effect a being distinct from its own (see §1.2.2). His basic point is that the efficient cause that formally contains its effect does not pass on the very same feature that it contains; rather, it only produces a feature of the same type. For Suárez, the type here is the kind of form or quality that the cause induces in its effect. A paradigmatic case would be one in which fire generates the same kind of “real quality” of heat in something else that it itself possesses.66 Suárez also allowed that there can be cases of bodily interaction where the “principal”67 efficient cause does not possess the same kind of quality, but is an “equivocal” cause that contains the quality it induces only eminently. He held, for instance, that heated water contains the quality of coldness “virtually” insofar as it has by its nature the active power to cool.68 Descartes of course rejected the whole category of real qualities and active powers that informs Suárez’s account of efficient causality on the grounds that all bodily accidents are mere modes of extended substance.69 As I indicated earlier, however, he in effect rejected as well the claim that there can be qualities or power in bodies “more noble than” bodily effects that also eminently contain these effects (see §2.1.3 (ii)). Descartes therefore could not accept Suárez’s position that there can be adequate bodily causes that eminently contain their effects. Even so, Suárez’s analysis of efficient causation serves to counter Broughton’s suggestion that Descartes’s containment axiom, when applied to the case of body–body interaction, requires a migration theory of motion. It seems that Descartes could hold that a body that is an efficient cause of motion itself contains a motion that is similar to, but nonetheless numerically distinct from, the motion it induces in another body. Indeed, in a passage from his correspondence with More that Broughton herself cites, Descartes explicitly rejects the migration theory of motion. No doubt prompted by the passage from the Principles that is suggestive of the migration theory, More protested that a mode of motion cannot “pass over”

66. As I indicate toward the start of §3.2.2, Suárez had a complex view both about which accidental features of bodies could be causes and what sort of effects the causally efficacious features could produce. 67. Recall here the distinction in Suárez, considered in §1.2.3 (ii), between instrumental and principal causes. 68. MD XVIII.3, ¶¶4and 7, ¶19, 1:616 and 635–36. For Suárez’s account of equivocal causality, see MD XVII.2, ¶21, 1:591–92. 69. See, for instance, Descartes’s claim in a 1643 letter to Mersenne, cited in §1.2.1, that “I do not suppose any real qualities in nature, which are joined to substance, as little souls to their bodies, and which can be separated from it by divine power, and thus I attribute no more reality to motion or to all the other varieties of substance that one calls qualities no more reality than the philosophers commonly attribute to shape, which they call not real quality but only mode” (AT 3:648–49).

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(transet) or “migrate” (migret) from one corporeal subject to another (23 July 1649, AT 5:382*). Descartes’s response, a portion of which I cited previously, is as follows: [T]his is not what I have written; indeed I think that motion as a mode continually changes. . . . But when I said that the same motion always remains in matter, I understood this to concern the force impelling its parts [de vi eius partes impellente], which force applies itself now to one part of matter, now to another, in accord with the laws proposed in articles 45 and following of the Second Part [of the Principles]. (30 Aug. 1649, AT 5:405)

In light of his talk in the discussion in the Principles of the third law of a body as “giving” to another the motion that it “loses,” it seems somewhat disingenuous for Descartes to claim that he never wrote that motion can be passed from one body to another. But his main point is perhaps that when he wrote that, he meant only that force is applied to a body in a manner that produces an alteration in its motion. And in the Principles itself, Descartes emphasizes that changes in the speed or direction of motion derive from “the quantum of force [quantum . . . virium] in [bodies], either to move, or to resist motion” (PP II.45, AT 8-1:67/CSM 1:244). The indication here is that the communication of motion is to be understood in terms not of the migration of the very same mode of motion, but rather of the production of a numerically distinct mode of motion by means of the application of a force. Nevertheless, there remains the requirement of Descartes’s containment axiom that the total or adequate bodily cause of changes in motion contain formally or eminently all of its effects in other bodies. If my analysis above of Descartes’s relation to Suárez is correct, eminent containment cannot be at issue here. So the question is whether the formal containment requirement is satisfied in cases of body–body interaction. In most of the basic cases of such interaction that he considers, Descartes in fact can allow that the efficient cause actually contains something similar to what it produces in its effect. In his discussion in the Principles of the seven collision rules that supplement the third law, he indicates that in all cases where a moving body collides either with a moving body smaller than or equal to itself or with a smaller body at rest, the bodily cause contains modes of the same type as those it produces.70 Matters are less straightforward, however, in cases where a moving body collides with a body at rest that is either larger than or equal in size to it. Descartes’s fourth and sixth rules of collision require that the body at rest produce an instantaneous reversal of the direction of the motion of the moving body in such cases, even though the resting body does not actually possess any motion, and thus does not possess the particular directional determination it produces in the moving body. So in these cases, the resting body that serves as the efficient and apparently total or adequate cause of the reversal of the moving body71 seems not to contain formally or eminently everything that it produces in the effect.

70. For a summary of the rules, see note 28. My comment applies to the first, second, third, fifth, and seventh rules. 71. With respect to bodies, at least; here I bracket God’s contribution as “universal and primary cause” to changes in motion.

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As I have indicated, however, the third law requires that both the resting body that causes a change and the moving body that is changed possess “force”—force for resisting, in the former case, and force for acting, in the latter. Even though the resting body does not formally contain motion with a certain speed and directional determination, it does formally contain a force that is at least as great as the force responsible for such motion. The resting body could therefore be understood to formally contain that motion in this attenuated sense.72 This sense would be all that Descartes required to adhere to his rule in the Principles—cited in the course of his discussion there of the implications of the third law—that one must “never attribute to a cause any effect that exceeds its capacity [potentiam]” (PP II.60, AT 8-1:76). The notion of bodily force that is so prominent in the version of the third law in the Principles serves to connect it directly to the first law in that text. For Descartes emphasizes that “the force of any given body to act on another, or to resist the action of another,” consists “in this one thing, that each and every thing tends, quantum in se est, to persist in the same state it is in, as posited in the first law” (II.43, AT 8-1:66). It is in virtue of the fact that a body has a tendency to persist in the same state quantum in se est that it has the force either to remain at rest or to persist in its motion. According to the second law, moreover, the persistence of the moving body involves a tendency toward rectilinear motion that derives from the instantaneous inclinations to motion in that body. The indication here seems to be that the efficacy of the laws as particular causes is to be explained in terms of the internal bodily forces and inclinations that are themselves responsible for changes in the distributions of motion.73 To be sure, Descartes claims in the Principles that both the second and the third laws follow from the divine attributes.74 It is certainly possible to read Descartes’s talk of inherent forces and inclinations—as Garber has, for instance—as a mere façon de parler, a way of describing the changes that God alone produces by means of his continuous

72. In §4.2.2, I propose that the innate mental faculty that Descartes posited in the 1647 Comments as a cause of certain features of sensory ideas must also be understood to formally contain those features in an attenuated sense. 73. In contrast, Hattab offers a reading on which Descartes holds that the laws themselves, and not any features of bodies, are secondary and particular causes (see Hattab 2000 and 2007). She claims that this “seems to be the only reading that does not contradict Descartes’s ontology,” and in particular his purported view that the nature of body consists in extension alone (Hattab 2000, 116; cf. 98–100). It is difficult to see how on this reading the causal efficacy of the laws could have a source distinct from God’s action. Such a reading therefore seems to be simply a version of an occasionalist interpretation of Descartes. In §3.2.2, I address the objection in Hattab and others that the attribution of causal efficacy to the bodies themselves conflicts with Descartes’s ontology of the material world. 74. In PP II.43 Descartes claims that the demonstration of the part of the third law concerning transfer of motion is provided by “the immutability of the operations of God, now continuously conserving the world by the same action with which he created it then” (AT 8 1:66), whereas in PP II.39 he holds that the “cause” (causa) of the second law is “the immutability and simplicity of the operations by which God conserves motion in matter” (AT 8-1:63). In The World all three laws are said to “depend only on the fact that God conserves each thing by a continuous action” (W VII, AT 11:44).

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conservation of the material world. However, Gueroult and Gabbey also suggest on Descartes’s behalf that the bodily forces that ground the laws of nature are explicable in terms of the existence or duration of bodies and their motions. There is of course the question of whether such a view is compatible with the reduction of matter to extension that Descartes’s ontology requires. But there is also the question whether he offered a notion of force that applies equally to the cases of rest and motion.

3.2.2. The Ontology of Bodily Force Toward the end of §3.1.3, I mentioned that the various forces that Descartes posits in his physics can be attributed either to bodies, or to God, or to nothing at all. I also noted that the second option is ruled out by the implication in Descartes that the various forces for acting and for resisting can change through time, given his firm position that nothing in God can be subject to change. But the first option would seem to be ruled out as well. For on Descartes’s official position in the Principles, “extension in length, breadth and depth constitutes the nature of corporeal substance,” and thus “everything else that can be attributed to body presupposes extension, and is merely a mode of an extended thing” (PP I.53, AT 8-1:25). Whatever forces for acting and for resisting are, it seems that they cannot be mere modes of extension akin to various shapes, sizes, and motions. But then it appears that such forces would be akin to the real qualities that the scholastics posited as secondary causes in nature and that Descartes himself wanted to banish from physics. We apparently are forced to the final option that the forces Descartes posited in his physics are mere fictions. Before acquiescing in this fictionalist interpretation of Descartes’s view of bodily force, however, it is worth pausing to consider the comparison to scholastic real qualities. I indicated in §1.3 the view in Suárez that among the predicamental accidents, only certain qualities, and not quantity, shape (in the category of quality) or local motion, can serve as principles of efficient causality. Clearly, Descartes rejected the assumption in Suárez that there are principles of action in bodies other than quantity, shape, and local motion. But did he accept the Suárezian position that these bodily features could not be principles of action? If so, Descartes would be forced to conclude that there are no such principles in bodies. However, it seems to me that the claim that Descartes in fact drew this conclusion is often based less on the textual evidence than on intuitions about what his identification of body with extension requires. In particular, the guiding intuition is that bare extension is something that is purely passive, the mere instantiation of a purely geometrical essence, and not something that can ground causal activity. Some of Descartes’s statements may seem to indicate that he conceived the extension that constitutes the nature of bodies that actually exist in the material world in just this manner. There is, for instance, his claim in the Principles that “I admit no other principles in physics but those in geometry or abstract mathematics” (PP II.64, AT 8-1:78), as well as his earlier remark in a letter to Mersenne that “my physics is nothing but geometry” (27 July 1638, AT 2:268). But Descartes’s own account of the laws of nature belies this simple identification of physics with geometry. For the objects of geometry, as present objectively in the mind that considers them, do not have either the tendency to persist in a particular state quantum in se est (as required

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by the first law), the instantaneous inclinations to rectilinear motion (as required by the second law), or the particular forces that require changes in the speeds and determinations of motions (as required by the third law). The reason that purely geometrical objects lack these features seems to be that they lack any sort of existence external to mind. But could Descartes hold that they possess the features simply in virtue of possessing this additional extra-mental existence? The answer to this question is yes, according to the most sophisticated argument in the literature for the view that Descartes attributes real causal efficacy to bodies.75 Thus, Alan Gabbey urges that he distinguishes “between a body’s essence as an idea, that is as existing objectively in the intellect, and the body’s existence outside the mind,” and that “force depends on extension in the sense that extension is presupposed in saying that something corporeal exists or endures” (Gabbey 1980, 238). Here Gabbey is drawing on the claim in Gueroult that according to Descartes, in reality, force, duration, and existence are one and the same thing (conatus) under three different aspects, and the three notions are identified in the instantaneous action in virtue of which corporeal substance exists and endures, that is, possesses the force which puts it into existence and duration. (Gueroult 1980, 197)

The difference between a purely geometrical object and an actually existing body is that only the latter possesses an existence or duration that, on Descartes’s official view in the Principles, is distinct merely in reason and not in reality from the substance that exists and endures (see PP I.62, AT 8-1:30). If force is simply identified with the attribute of existence or duration, then it seems to be something that concretely existing bodies, but not abstract geometrical objects, possess. There is the question, however, whether the forces that Gueroult identifies with the durational existence of bodies can themselves be identified with the various forces for acting and resisting that Descartes posits in the Principles. It may seem that they in fact cannot be so identified for the simple reason that whereas Descartes provides the example of existence or duration as something “that always remains unmodified,” and so is an attribute in the strict sense (PP I.56, AT 8-1:26), his view that the forces of particular parts of matter constantly change due to collision indicates that they are variable, and so must be considered as modes rather than attributes. Gabbey attempts to supplement Gueroult’s interpretation in a manner that addresses this problem. He retains the view in Gueroult that there is a sense in which force can be identified with the invariable bodily attribute of duration. However, Gabbey introduces an additional sort of force that is present in bodies as a variable mode rather than an attribute. He explains this distinction between the two kinds of bodily force in terms

75. Cf. the causal realist interpretations of Descartes’s physics in Westfall 1971, ch. 2, and Cottingham 1997. However, Westfall emphasizes the problematic nature of dynamical concepts in Descartes, and Cottingham concludes that “when talking about impact, impulse and transfer of motion between bodies, [Descartes] seems not to have given any serious attention to the precise meaning of the concepts he used” (Cottingham 1997, 164). But see the “concurrentist” interpretations of Descartes in the literature cited in the introduction, note 11, which tend to emphasize the coherence of Descartes’s account of causation.

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of the Thomistic distinction in Descartes between causes secundum fieri and secundum esse (see §§1.1.2 and 2.2.1). On Gabbey’s reading of Descartes, “force as causa secundum esse is . . . an attribute of body, in the sense that qua cause it is necessarily entailed by a body’s duration, viewed simpliciter and irrespective of mode,” whereas when the forces are viewed “as quantifiable causes of change in the corporeal world, or as reasons . . . explaining absence of change of a certain kind in particular instances, they are causae secundum fieri” that are “clearly in body diverso modo, and so are modes of body, rather than attributes” (Gabbey 1980, 236, 237). But when forces are present in bodies diverso modo, what sort of modes are they? Gabbey does not say, but there is an answer that is connected to the interpretation I offered earlier of Descartes’s account of temporal parts (see §2.2.2). I took Descartes’s considered position to be that these parts are modally distinct features of the attribute of duration. It might seem natural, on Gabbey’s view, to identify the variable forces that serve as the quantifiable causes secundum fieri with the various modal parts of the duration of interacting bodies. Gabbey himself indicates that he would reject this sort of move on the grounds that “a body cannot have ‘more or less’ duration: either it exists or it does not, and if it does exist, in whatever modal disposition, it necessarily endures without ‘existential variation’ ” (Gabbey 1980, 237). But I previously anticipated this line of objection when I noted that whereas duration is not subject to variation when considered just as an attribute, Descartes indicates clearly enough that this attribute nonetheless has various distinguishable parts. I have already proposed that we take Descartes to hold that God is the cause secundum esse of the constant quantity of motion (see §3.1.3). My suggestion now is that we read him as saying that the various modes of bodily duration are causes secundum fieri of changes in the distribution of this quantity among the parts of matter. But this way of putting the suggestion is perhaps too abstract and disconnected from Descartes’s discussion in the Principles of forces for acting and resisting. To make this suggestion more concrete, let us start with the point in this text at which the third law of nature makes contact with the first. I have noted the claim in Principles II.43 that the forces that the third law posits as responsible for changes in motion due to collision consist simply “in this one thing, that each and every thing tends, quantum in se est, to persist in the same state it is in, as posited in the first law” (AT 8-1:66). What is in est, according to the first law, is simply the tendency to continue in the same state. What the later reference to this law makes clear is that this tendency is not constant but varies depending on the nature of the mode involved. The measure of the tendencies to persist in motion and rest is just the same as the measure of the forces involved in those states. Thus, in the case where one body is double the size of another body moving at the same speed, the first body has double the tendency to persist in its state of motion that the other body has to persist in its state. In the case where a moving body collides with a body at rest, the strength of the tendency of the latter to persist in its state of rest is measured by the product of the size of that body and the speed of the body that collides with it.76 These tendencies can be

76. At least this is so with respect to the 1644 Latin edition of the Principles. As indicated in note 30 above, the 1647 French edition of this text provides a more complicated measure for the force for resisting.

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said to be something in est insofar as they are simply varying modal features of the durations of moving and resting bodies. As we know, Descartes claims that duration, considered as an attribute, is distinct only ratione, and not in re, from the substance that endures (PP I.62, AT 8-1:30). On the view I propose, he also holds that the strength of duration, or force, is only rationally distinct from the features of motion and rest that possess that sort of duration. One reason that it seems that force is not intrinsic to these modes is that the modes themselves can be considered abstractly as purely mathematical objects, the nature of which is exhausted by their geometric and kinematic aspects. In this respect, these modes are similar to the triangle that, as Descartes writes in a letter to an unknown correspondent, can be considered merely with respect to its essence, in abstraction from its existence. In this case, according to Descartes, the thought of the essence of a triangle differs modally from the thought of the existence of that triangle. But he continues in this letter by noting that outside of thought the essence of a triangle and its existence are “in no way distinct” (1645 or 1646, AT 4:350). Descartes could allow similarly that the thought of force, that is, of strength of duration, is modally distinct from the thought of the modal feature that has that force. However, it still seems open to him to say that the force or strength of duration is in no way distinct from that duration as it exists external to mind. In light of this distinction between the two ways of considering the modes of motion and rest, we can discern an important ambiguity in Descartes’s official position that all bodily modes must be conceived through extension. For as Gabbey emphasizes, extension itself can be conceived merely abstractly, as present objectively in the intellect, or concretely, as something not distinct from its durational existence in reality. If the modes are understood in terms of abstract extension, then force cannot be conceived through the nature of body. This nature would be exhausted by purely mathematical features. But if the modes are understood in terms of concrete extension, force can be conceived through the nature of body insofar as this force is identified with the strength of the duration that does not differ from the modes in reality. I have mentioned in passing Descartes’s claim in correspondence that determination is a mode that inheres in motion. There he is addressing Hobbes’s objection that determination cannot so inhere given that motion is a mode and not a subject. But Descartes insists that determination can inhere “as in a subject” even though that in which it inheres is a mode rather than a substance (To Mersenne for Hobbes, 21 Apr. 1641, AT 3:355–36). As other commentators have emphasized, determination is for Descartes a composite mode involving two further modal features of motion, namely, direction, on the one hand, and quantity of motion (scalar speed × size), on the other.77 77. See Gabbey 1980, 248–50; Garber 1992, 188–93; McLaughlin 2000, 87–97. Descartes indicated that the nature of determination is fixed not only by the direction of the motion but also by the quantity of the motion determined. A component of the determination of a particular quantity of motion can be shared by motions that have different quantities, but the composite determination can belong only to a motion with a particular motive quantity. Thus, to take an example from Descartes’s Dioptrics (at AT 6:97), though a tennis ball can have the same horizontal determination before and after a refraction that involves a change in speed, it cannot have the same overall determination in these two cases. For documentation of this point in Descartes, see McLaughlin 2000, 94–97.

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The force for acting in the moving body would be simply the strength of the duration of the motive quantity that modifies the motion in that body. As long as this quantity continues to endure, so does the force that is bound up with that duration. Matters are less straightforward in the case of rest. As I noted in §3.1.2 (iii), there is the implication of Descartes’s remarks in his correspondence with More that force for resisting is distinct from the state of rest itself. And there is in fact good reason for him to refrain from identifying this force with the duration of the rest, since the force is supposed to be proportional to the speed of a body that collides with it. Thus, the resting body seems to have this force only at the instant of impact. It is difficult to see how the force could be identified with the duration of features of the mode of rest. I argue below that this difficulty in turn renders problematic an account of God’s conservation of the quantity of rest in terms of this force. The case of the instantaneous inclinations posited in the second law raises different problems. As we have seen, Descartes sharply distinguishes the quantity that measures the force of motion from the directionality of that motion. Since the inclinations concern the direction of motion exclusively, they cannot be folded into motive force. Moreover, Descartes holds that though motions can have varying forces, there is no difference in the strengths of the rectilinear inclinations of those motions. Nevertheless, it is clear that the inclinations can change over time. This is shown by Descartes’s own example of the stone in a sling, which at different instants of its circular motion has inclinations to move off in straight paths at different tangents from the circle (PP II.39, AT 8-1:64–65).78 Inclinations are therefore as much variable modes of a motion as the forces deriving from its various quantities. The fact that the inclinations are instantaneous precludes any explication of them in terms of the duration of motion. Even so, the inclinations seem to be as much internal features of motion as the forces tied to its duration. It might be thought that Descartes himself offered a different account of inclination that is more in line with Garber’s fictionalist interpretation. There is for instance Descartes’s point in the Principles, also found in The World, that the claim that bodies recede from the center of a circle indicates “only that they are so situated, and so incited to motion, that they will really go [away from the center] if they are impeded by no other cause” (PP III.56, AT 8-1:108; cf. W XIII, AT 11:84). The suggestion here seems to be that the inclination is not a real feature of the motion, but merely a disguised counterfactual conditional of the form that if there were no impediment, bodies in circular motion would recede from the center.79 However, notice that in the Principles the inclination is said to explain not only what would happen in certain counterfactual circumstances, but also what does happen at the actual instant the bodies possess this inclination. Thus, Descartes observes in his discussion of the second law in this text that “our hand can experience this in the stone itself while

78. Admittedly, there is little in the way of an explicit argument in this section for the conclusion that the motion must be at a tangent from the circle as opposed to some other straight path. For a criticism of an argument for this conclusion in The World, see Garber 1992, 221–23. See also the discussion in Des Chene 1996, 281–82, of different arguments for this conclusion in the work of later Cartesians. 79. A similar view of this passage is suggested in Garber 1992, 219.

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we turn it in the sling,” since we feel the stone pulling away from us (PP II.39, AT 8-1:64).80 So just as forces are real modes in bodies that produce changes in motion due to collision, so inclinations are real modes of motion that produce the pull of a body in circular motion away from the center. If this account is correct, then for Descartes the bodies in motion that God continuously conserves have as modes of their duration various forces that determine the outcomes of collisions, just as the motion that he conserves has as modal features of itself various inclinations that determine not only how it would proceed if unimpeded, but also certain effects that a moving body actually does have. These forces and inclinations are therefore true causes secundum fieri that produce the particular changes due to contact among bodies. But if the three laws of nature are grounded directly in such bodily causes, it might seem odd that Descartes consistently presented them as deriving from God’s activity as universal cause of motion. On the view that there are no causally efficacious inclinations or forces in bodies, this appeal to God would seem to be straightforward, since God would be required as the true cause of the effects attributed to these bodily features. However, if one takes seriously the persistent suggestion in Descartes that inclinations and forces are causally efficacious features of bodies and their motions, there is a need to reconsider his account of the manner in which the activity of such features as particular causes is related to the universal causality of God’s ordinary concursus.

3.2.3. Divine and Bodily Causes In 1678, the French Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche criticized those who attributed to Descartes the view that bodies can move each other, “against what he says expressly in articles 36 and 37 of the second part of these Principles of Philosophy” (Malebranche 1958–84, 3:238/Malebranche 1997, 677). More recently, Garber claims that “it seems to me as clear as anything that, for Descartes, God is the only cause in the inanimate world of bodies, that bodies cannot themselves be genuine causes of change in the physical world of extended substance” (Garber 1993, 12). An initial consideration of the articles that Malebranche cited seems to confirm an occasionalist reading of Descartes’s account of body–body interaction. For in article 36 of the second part of the Principles Descartes holds that the conservation of the total quantity of motion (and rest) follows simply from the divine attribute of immutability. Though he also refers in article 37 to laws of nature as secondary and particular causes of motions in particular bodies, it is understandable that some have taken these laws as well to follow directly from divine immutability. After all, Descartes holds that the reason for the second law is the same as the reason for the first, namely, “the immutability and simplicity of the operation by which God conserves motion in matter” (PP II.39, AT 8-1:63). And he notes that the proof of the second part of the third law, concerning the transfer in collision of a quantity of motion from a stronger body to a weaker one, consists in “the immutability of the

80. The last point about the pull of the stone is made explicitly in the version of this passage in the French edition, at AT 9-2:86.

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operations of God, now continually conserving the world by the same action with which he created it then” (PP II.42, AT 8-1:66). For Garber, the clear indication here is that “God stands behind the world of bodies and is the direct cause of their motion” (Garber 1993, 14). As I indicated at the outset of this chapter, he takes Descartes to substitute God for the substantial forms that the scholastics posited to explain natural change in the material world. It is beyond doubt that Descartes rejects the appeal to material substantial forms and real qualities to explain natural change. What is less clear is that his alternative account of body–body interaction in the Principles takes God alone to stand in for such forms and qualities. For as we have seen, there is an explicit reference in the discussion of the three laws of nature to internal features of bodies and their motions that provide the basis both for certain kinds of persistence and for changes in motion due to collision. The immutability of God’s ordinary concursus is of course always in the background, but the official view in this text is that this action is only a universal cause that requires supplementation by the particular causes of motion. We can understand the division of labor suggested here by drawing on Descartes’s view in the Principles that God’s ordinary concursus consists simply in the fact that he “diversely moved parts of matter when he first created it, and now conserves this whole matter with the same plan [eademque ratione] by which he first created it” (PP II.36, AT 8-1:62). Given my reading above of Descartes’s account of the ontology of bodily force, we can take the claim here to be that God originally created moving parts of matter with durations that have degrees of strength measured by the quantity of their motions. Just as these parts are modified by a quantity of motion, so the whole of matter is modified by a quantity that is the sum of the quantities of motion that modify its parts.81 The object of God’s act of creation/conservation is simply the total quantity of matter as modified by the total quantity of the motion of its parts (see figure 3.1). God conserves the total quantity of motive force—the superadded “impulse” mentioned in the correspondence with More—simply by conserving the total quantity of the durational strength of the moving parts that he infused into matter at the start.82 But this act of determining the total quantity itself underdetermines the precise manner in which the quantities are distributed across the parts over time. The determination of this distribution requires further the action of the motive forces of the individual parts, which produce changes only in the case of collision. Interestingly, a similar sort of division of labor in the production of motion is found in the critique of Malebranche’s occasionalist physics in Fontenelle’s Doubts 81. The quantities of the parts are therefore modes of the total quantity that is itself a mode of matter as a whole. In contrast, as we have seen, the parts themselves are substantial parts rather than modes of the whole matter (see chapter 2, note 9). The result here is that moving parts are substances that possess as modes quantities that are themselves modifications of the total quantity of motion that modifies the material substance that includes these parts. 82. Cf. Clarke’s view that according to Descartes, “God imparted a real quality called force or power to physical bodies, and that the amount of this power is fixed by the immutability of his creative action” (Clarke 1996, 335). Clarke characterizes this quality as a mode of body, but does not indicate precisely what sort of mode it is. My identification of forces with modal features of the durations of bodily motions can be seen as a friendly amendment to his view.

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Total Quantity of Matter ( = sum of quantities of parts)

Total Quantity of Motion ( = sum of quantities of motion in moving parts)

FIGURE 3.1 Object of Divine Concursus

concerning . . . Occasional Causes (1686), a work that I cited at the outset of chapter 1. In this text, Fontenelle proposes that “the moving force of God is that by which he produces a motion that was not,” whereas “the moving force of creatures is that by which they pass a motion that is already there from one body to another” (Fontenelle 1989–2001, 1:562). We have seen that in his correspondence with More, Descartes attempts to distance himself from the view that motion is literally passed from one body to another in collision. However, I think he could accept Fontenelle’s suggestion that God creates and conserves a certain total quantity of motion in matter by means of his universal causality, whereas particular bodies change the distribution of this total quantity among themselves by means of collision.83 According to Descartes, however, God continuously conserves not only the total quantity of motion, but also what is essential to particular motions. More specifically, he so conserves the instantaneous inclinations to rectilinear motion. These inclinations in turn explain the presence of the centrifugal pressure involved in circular motion. In a striking passage from The World, Descartes attempts to illustrate the differences between the contributions of the universal and particular causes of determination by drawing an analogy to God’s role in the production of sinful action. He notes there that “the theologians teach that God is also the author of our actions, insofar as they exist and insofar as they have some goodness,” and that “it is the various dispositions of our wills that can render them evil.” Just so, according to Descartes, “God is the author of all the motions in the world insofar as they exist and

83. See also the claim in Regis’s Use of Reason, cited in note 47, that whereas God produces the “substance” of motion, secondary causes produce various modifications of this motion.

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insofar as they are rectilinear,” whereas “it is the various dispositions of matter that render them irregular and curved” (W VII, AT 11:47–48).84 Toward the start of §3.2, I noted the puzzle that Descartes’s three laws of nature seem to be too heterogeneous to be grounded in the same way in God’s conservation of the quantity of motion by means of his ordinary concursus. We now have the material for a solution to this puzzle. God conserves motion or motive force simply by continuing his act of creating matter divided into parts with motions that possess collectively a certain total strength of duration, and that possess individually instantaneous inclinations to motion along a straight path. The continuation of the initial act of creation results in the continuing presence of the forces and inclinations that provide the foundation for the three laws of nature. The laws therefore follow from God’s immutability in the sense that they follow from the matter in motion that he immutably creates/conserves as universal and primary cause. The laws are particular causes, moreover, in the sense that they reflect the nature of the inclinations and forces that are themselves the particular and secondary causes of changes in motions. Contrary to what one might think initially, then, Descartes does not hold that God directly creates the laws, which in turn condition matter in motion. Rather, the view that I find in him is that God directly creates matter in motion, and that the laws merely reflect the natures of what God has created. To this point I have emphasized the case of God’s conservation of the quantity of motion through his conservation of the total quantity of acting forces—the vires ad agendum posited in the Principles. As I have indicated, however, there are serious complications in the case of God’s conservation of the quantity of rest. Whereas motive forces have a quantifiable strength even prior to collision, the resisting forces in resting bodies have such a strength only at the instant those bodies collide with other bodies. Thus, the activity of these resisting forces—the vires ad resistendum of the Principles—cannot depend solely on God’s conservation of a quantifiable tendency in bodies to persist in a certain state. Rather, what is required is some additional impulse from God at the moment of impact that serves to resist the action of the moving body in cases where this body is equal to or smaller than the body at rest. As we will discover, however, the suggestion that there is a special sort of divine concurrence with the action of the resting body is out of line with the strongly conservationist character of Descartes’s account in the Principles of the ordinary concursus that exhausts God’s natural contribution to body–body interaction.

84. In the first volume of his Search after Truth (1674), Malebranche appeals to a similar analogy in holding that just as “all motions make a straight line” and deviate from this only due to “some foreign and particular causes that determine them and that change them into curved lines by their oppositions,” so “all inclinations that we have from God are straight” insofar as they are directed toward the “good in general,” but only “if they have no foreign cause that determines the impression of nature toward evil ends” (bk. 1, ch. 1, Malebranche 1958–84, 1:45/Malebranche 1997, 4). For discussion of Malebranche’s use of this analogy to explain human freedom, and some indication of the problematic nature of this use, see Schmaltz 1996, 220–22.

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3.3. DESCARTES’S CONSERVATIONIST PHYSICS It is clear from several passages cited in §3.1.3 that Descartes helps himself to the scholastic notion of divine concursus in describing God’s activity as universal cause. I also noted in this section, however, that in a majority of these passages Descartes tends to conflate God’s concursus with his act of conservation. The question I now want to address is whether his account of God’s universal causality of motion systematically conflates the two, or whether there is room in his physics for something like a traditional form of scholastic concurrence. We know that Suárez distinguished sharply between God’s conservation of the being of creatures, which does not differ in reality from his act of creating that being, and his concursus with secondary causes, which varies with the actions of those causes (see §1.2.3 (ii)). Given this Suárezian position, our question now is whether Descartes’s physics requires an act of concursus on God’s part that differs from his act of conservation and that varies with the action of the secondary cause. But once the question is put in this manner, the answer would seem to be clearly in the negative. For Descartes consistently indicates that there is only a single unvarying action that God contributes as universal cause of motion. Just as he insists in The World that the laws of nature “depend only on the fact that God conserves each thing by a continued action” (W VII, AT 11:44), so he claims later in the Principles that the law governing transfers of motion “is demonstrated by the immutability of the action of God, continually now conserving the world by the same action by which he created it then” (PP II.42, AT 8-1:66). Of course, it was a theological commonplace that God himself is wholly immutable. Moreover, Suárez allowed that divine concursus can be said to be always the same if one is speaking of “the internal concursus or volition by which God concurs” (MD XXII.4, ¶8, 1:831). What changes is only the external concursus, the action that resides in the patient. However, Descartes insists not only that the principle of action in God is immutable, but also that what he produces is always the same. Thus, he claims in The World that it follows from divine immutability that God “always produces the same effect,” and in particular always produces “a certain quantity of motions in matter in general” (W VII, AT 11:43).85 And though Descartes seems to allow in the Principles that God could produce changes by means of acts that go beyond his ordinary concursus, he continues to hold that this concursus itself yields a constant effect. This argument for the constancy of the effect of divine activity appears to be problematic. After all, Descartes allows, with Suárez, that an eternal principle in God can yield temporal effects. Why not grant, with Suárez again, that an immutable divine principle can yield an inconstant concursus? Here I think it is best to understand Descartes’s line of argument in terms of Suárez’s account not of the divine concursus, but rather of divine conservation. Suárez argued that God’s creation of an object cannot be distinguished from his subsequent conservation of it, since in both cases the agent is producing in the same way, namely, ex nihilo, the very same effect,

85. On the possible significance of the fact that this passage refers to motions rather than simply to motion, see note 18.

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namely, the esse of the object. We can derive the sameness of the act from the fact that the mode of production and the terminus remain the same (MD XXI.2, ¶3, 1:791). Descartes assumes that God produces motion as a universal and primary cause by means of a single concursus identical to his creation of matter in motion. Drawing on Suárez’s view of conservation, however, we can infer that since this act remains the same, it must have some common terminus, which for Descartes, as I see it, would be the existence of a constant total quantity both of matter and of the durational strength (i.e., force or impulse) of its moving parts. If my reading of Descartes is correct, then there can be in his physics no difference between God’s ordinary concursus and his continuous conservation of matter in motion. Since this continuing action must have a constant effect, the changes in motion produced by bodily collisions must be due not to that action, but rather—as Descartes himself indicates—to the particular and secondary causes of motion. We are far here from the concurrentist position in Suárez that the diverse actions that produce such changes are identical to God’s action. Instead, Descartes seems to me to be closer to the mere conservationism of Suárez’s opponent Durandus. Recall that in Durandus’s view, though God is the immediate cause of the being of secondary causes, his only contribution to the action of secondary causes is his conservation of such causes (see §1.1.3). In Descartes’s case, the view is that God’s ordinary concursus is exhausted by his continuous conservation of matter with the forces of its parts and inclinations of its motions. These forces and inclinations, rather than the divine concursus itself, are the immediate causes of changes due to collisions among these parts. Thus, far from placing Descartes with the occasionalists, I see him as advocating an alternative to this position that departed from occasionalism more radically even than Suárez’s concurrentism. There is admittedly one passage in which Descartes seems to favor the view, directly opposed to Durandus’s mere conservationism, that God is in fact the immediate cause of our actions. This passage is from a 1641 letter to Regius in which Descartes offers his Dutch correspondent a response to the objection of their common critic Gisbertius Voetius that mental faculties rather than our mind itself must be the immediate principle of volitional and intellectual acts. What Voetius marks down here of you in no way opposes you. For since theologians indeed say that no created substance is the immediate principle of its operation, they understand this as follows: that no creature can operate without the concursus of God; not, however, that it ought to have a certain created faculty, distinct from itself, through which to operate. For it would be absurd to say that such a created faculty could be the immediate principle of a certain operation, but the substance itself could not. (May 1641, AT 3:372)86

But notice that his main conclusion here is merely that it does not follow from the fact that no created substance is the immediate principle of its operation that every substance acts through a faculty that is distinct from it. There is no requirement that the divine concursus on which all effects in the created world depend is in fact

86. This is one of the passages that Pessin cites in support of his view that Descartes accepted a kind of “nomic concurrentism” (in Pessin 2003, 37). See note 88.

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identical to the operations through which creatures produce those effects. We therefore cannot assume that Descartes’s talk of God’s immediate concursus indicates a preference for Suárez’s concurrentism over Durandus’s mere conservationism. And given his emphasis on the constant nature of the product of God’s ordinary concursus, there is even reason to think that Descartes could not distinguish concursus from conservation in the manner Suárez required.87 But though Descartes himself did not sharply distinguish God’s conservation of the world from his concursus with secondary causes, we can reconstruct such a distinction in terms of the contrast in his correspondence with More between God’s creating matter at rest and “leaving it to itself ” and his creating matter with an “impulse” that involves the motion of its parts. In the former case there would be no motive forces or inclinations with which God could concur, whereas in the latter case God’s initial shove of matter would yield forces and inclinations with which God must concur. Even so, on Descartes’s official view this concursus involves nothing more than God’s conservation of matter with a total quantity of durational strength and of motions with their instantaneous inclinations. Des Chene has proposed an alternative manner of distinguishing between conservation and concurrence in Descartes’s physics.88 In his view, God’s concurrence consists in the “moving force” by which he causes a moving body to change the states of other bodies with which it collides, whereas his conservation consists in the “resisting force” by which he resists changes in collision to the state of rest in a resting body (Des Chene 1996, 334–36). Since Des Chene takes Descartes to deny that

87. In his Use of Reason, Regis follows Descartes in speaking of God’s concours with secondary causes (see chapter 1, note 77), but also indicates that in the case of body–body interaction, this concourse involves only God’s creation of motion simpliciter, and not the particular determinations of motion that secondary causes produce (I-2.32, Regis 1996, 384–85; cf. I 2.11, 271–74). Regis’s position admittedly requires the conclusion, not to be found in Descartes, that the motion that God produces is an atemporal nature that particular motions express in a temporal manner (see the discussion of this position in Schmaltz 2003). Despite this important difference from Descartes, the case of Regis serves to reinforce the lesson that we cannot simply assume on the basis of the fact that Descartes used concurrentist terminology that he is committed to a traditional scholastic understanding of divine concursus. 88. See also Pessin’s attribution to Descartes of a “nomic concurrentism” on which “God concurs with bodies in their effects on each other via willing the laws of motion; but these laws produce their effects only in conjunction with the relevant ‘initial’ conditions, such as states of matter” (Pessin 2003, 40). In contrast to conservation, concurrence involves not only God’s willing the laws, but also a contribution on the part of the material conditions. Given Pessin’s insistence on the intrinsic passivity of the matter Descartes posited (40), however, the material conditions would seem to serve merely as occasions for divine action. Pessin’s view therefore seems to be a version of an occasionalist reading of Descartes. Moreover, there is no reference in Descartes to a separate willing of the laws of nature on the part of God. The indication in the Principles is rather that God’s contribution to the laws is exhausted by his continued conservation of the matter and motion that he first created in the world. The fact that these particular laws hold is simply a consequence of this divine action, and not something to be explained by divine volitions that have these laws as their content.

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bodies can be real efficient causes, he admits that in concurring God is not genuinely acting with secondary causes (336–37). Nevertheless, he insists that Descartes can preserve “some sort of distinction between conservation and concurrence” that has “been refashioned to suit a physical world without active powers” (341). I have already argued that Descartes’s intention is to allow for a physical world that has an internal source of activity. But even apart from this point, the suggestion that moving force in Descartes pertains to concurrence rather than to conservation seems to me to be problematic. For Descartes indicates in the Principles that both the total quantity of matter and of the motion (and rest) of its parts are conserved by a single divine act, namely, the ordinary concursus that is merely a continuation of the original act by which God created the material world. Indeed, if any additional act of concurrence be involved at all, it would seem to pertain to the case of resisting force. In the case of moving force, it can be said that there is a modal quantity that is continuously conserved in all natural interactions. As I have noted, however, the resisting force that Descartes posits in his fourth and sixth collision rules is not a conserved quantity, but rather something that enters the scene only at the moment of collision and that is not conserved after that moment. Thus this force cannot be referred solely to the ordinary concursus by which God produces a constant effect. But the clear view in the Principles is that this concursus provides the sole divine foundation for the laws of nature. It therefore seems to me that far from providing a basis for a conception of divine conservation, as Des Chene suggests, resisting forces cannot be explained in terms of the sort of conservation that Descartes took to constitute God’s activity as universal cause of the material world. Even if Descartes can conceive of God’s concursus with the motive forces of material parts in a conservationist manner, however, special problems seem to arise when one considers his views on mind–body interaction. For one thing, there is the objection, from Descartes’s time to our own, that he is not entitled to the claim that there is such interaction given the implication of his dualism that minds and bodies have radically heterogeneous natures. I argued in the previous chapter that Descartes’s containment axiom does not preclude such interaction. However, I also conceded toward the end of this chapter that this axiom does not provide much help in explaining precisely how unextended minds and extended bodies produce changes in each other. In the case of body–body interactions, Descartes at least can appeal to bodily forces that have comparable degrees of strength. But what sort of forces could bring objects as dissimilar as mind and body into causal relation with each other? And what precisely is God’s role in bringing about this sort of interaction? It turns out that Descartes has even less to say about mind–body interaction than he does about body–body interaction. Nevertheless, we will discover that he says enough to indicate that it is his considered position that though mind-to-body action is in some respects less problematic than body-to-mind action, even the latter is possible with the help of divinely instituted natures. And as was the case with his accounts of body–body interaction and the causal axioms, we will discover that we cannot fully comprehend the details of his views on mind–body interaction in abstraction from their scholastic context.

4

Causation in Psychology

Scholastic psychology, as the science of the soul (in Greek, psuche-), was a study of life in general. Guided by the procedure in Aristotle’s De Anima, the scholastics posited souls to explain not only the rationality of human beings or the sentience of animals, but also the vegetative functions of plants.1 Descartes rejects this sort of science of the soul, as indicated by his protest in a 1641 letter to Regius (then a friend; see §4.2.2) that the vegetative and sensory souls of the scholastics are nothing more than “locomotive powers” that consist in certain arrangements of bodily parts, and that are thus distinct in kind from the rational soul (May 1641, AT 3:371). It is true that Descartes at times helps himself to the scholastic view that the rational soul is the “substantial form” of the human composite.2 However, he could not accept, in the manner scholastic traditionalists did, the project of showing how the rational soul provides the foundation for all the functions of the living human body.3 As he insists to Regius, “no actions can be reckoned human unless they depend on reason” (3:371). More accurately, Descartes’s view is that only those actions that involve some kind of thought can be the subject of human psychology. What is new to his psychology is the exclusive focus on the relation of thought to the motions in the machine that for him constitutes the human body.

1. The best recent discussion of the scholastic science of the soul is found in Des Chene 2000a. Des Chene 2001 is a companion volume that considers the alternative in Descartes to the portions of this scholastic science that concern living bodies. 2. See, for instance, To Regius, Jan. 1642, AT 3:503, 505. 3. I say ‘traditionalist’ because there were scholastics who deviated from the standard Thomistic line, to which Suárez adhered, that there is only one substantial form of the human composite. In the letter I have quoted, Descartes tells Regius that his claim that human beings have a threefold soul “is a heretical thing to say” (May 1641, AT 3:371).

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We will discover that Descartes often speaks as if thoughts and corresponding motions casually interact. It would appear that given the restriction of his containment axiom to efficient causes and their effects (see §2.1.2 (ii)), this interaction involves efficient causality. Notoriously, however, it has seemed to many that the claim that mind and body are real efficient causes of changes in each other is particularly problematic for Descartes. I mentioned at the outset of the first chapter the claim in Fontenelle’s Doubts that the system of occasional causes arose from the “extreme disproportion” that Descartes introduced between mind and body. Robert Richardson has dubbed the view that such a disproportion renders mind–body interaction problematic “the problem of heterogeneity” (Richardson 1982), or what I call, for short, the heterogeneity problem. The assumption central to this problem is that causal interaction requires a kind of likeness between cause and effect that is in fact missing in the case of objects as heterogeneous in nature as Descartes took mind and body to be. Sometimes Descartes’s way with the allegedly scandalous heterogeneity problem is short. In response to Gassendist questions concerning the intelligibility of the union of mind and body, for instance, Descartes notes curtly, in a section added to the 1647 French edition of the Meditations, that “the whole difficulty that [such questions] contain proceeds solely from a supposition that is false and cannot in any way be proved, namely that, if the soul and the body are two different substances with diverse natures, this prevents them from being able to act on each other” (AT 9-1:213).4 This line of response is supported to some extent by the result of our discussion in chapter 2 that Descartes’s containment axiom is consistent with at least some forms of mind–body interaction. Even so, when Princess Elisabeth raises the question in 1643 of how an immaterial soul can determine the bodily animal spirits so as to perform voluntary actions, Descartes replies that this question “seems to me to be that which one can ask me most properly in view of the writings I have published” (21 May 1643, AT 3:664). He then attempts to address this question by appealing to the “primitive notion” of the soul-body union. But though the suggestion here is that this primitive notion is required to explain any sort of mind–body interaction, Descartes’s considered position is more complicated than this. For reasons that are intelligible in light of the scholastic context of his thought, Descartes never admits the possibility of bodily action on a mind not united to it, but explicitly allows that disembodied minds not only can but actually do act on body. To explain Descartes’s complex views on mind–body interaction, I begin in §4.1 with his account of the soul–body union, starting with the one he provides in his 1643 correspondence with Elisabeth. It turns out that both Elisabeth’s objections and Descartes’s response in this correspondence address difficulties concerning mind–body interaction and the union that differ from those deriving from the heterogeneity problem. In §4.2, I consider Descartes’s account of that portion of the union involving body-to-mind action. The difficulties with this account can be understood in terms of the scholastic problem of the relation of the bodily senses to intellectual cognition. Such difficulties are reflected most clearly in a famous passage in which

4. See also To Hyperaspistes, Aug. 1641, AT 3:425–26.

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Descartes refers to motions in the brain as “occasions” for the formation of sensory ideas by an innate faculty of mind. But though it is tempting to take the occasioning here to be noncausal, there is evidence that Descartes wants to make room for the position that brain motions serve as a special sort of efficient cause. In §4.3, I turn to Descartes’s account of mind-to-body action. Here again, there is a link to earlier scholastic discussions—in this case, concerning the action of incorporeal spirits on corporeal objects. What is particularly relevant to Descartes’s various comments regarding mind-to-body action is the insistence in scholastics such as Suárez that spirits must be “present” to bodies to move them. This scholastic background helps to make sense of Descartes’s attempts to explicate the action of mind on body in terms both of the action of the quality of heaviness and of an “extension of power” found in minds. What is not anticipated in the scholastic discussions, however, is the problem in Descartes—to which Leibniz most notably drew attention— of the compatibility of mind-to-body action with the basic principle in Cartesian physics of the conservation of the total quantity of motion. In fact, Descartes himself never explicitly endorsed the position—which Leibniz attributed to him and which later Cartesians clearly embraced—that finite minds can only change the direction of moving bodies, and not create new motion. Even so, there are reasons deriving from his conservationist physics for him to adopt such a position.

4.1. MIND–BODY INTERACTION AND UNION When addressing the issue of mind–body interaction, Descartes often emphasizes his position that our soul is united in a special way to the human body. This is understandable given the implication of this position that the union involves a special sort of interaction. However, in considering his views on this topic, it is important not to conflate the issues of union and interaction. After all, we will discover that Descartes insists on the possibility that certain immaterial entities, such as God and angels, can act on bodies even though they are not united to any of them in the way in which the human soul is united to a body. I also find in his writings the implication that disembodied minds can have no sensory states. On my reading, then, the problem in the case of the human soul of how the body to which it is united can cause its sensations simply does not arise for such minds. In contrast to the heterogeneity problem, which yields a single problem with mind–body interaction, there are in Descartes several different problems with such interaction, only some of which concern the union. In what follows, I attempt to distinguish various issues concerning mind–body interaction and union and to show how such issues are or are not related to Descartes’s account of the union. I begin with his important exchange with Elisabeth, which broaches both issues. Then, following the lead of Descartes’s remarks to Elisabeth, I focus on the issue of the union. Though his writings may seem at times to suggest that the union merely consists in a certain set of connections between mental and bodily states, I take his more considered position to be that the union also involves something underlying those states that serves to explain their connections. Finally, I consider Descartes’s view that our sensory and volitional states reflect the special sort of interaction that occurs in the case of the union.

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4.1.1. Elisabeth’s Objections and Descartes’s Response Perhaps Descartes’s most famous comments on the issue of mind–body interaction occur in his 1643 correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. Elisabeth was the daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, electress Palatine and queen of Bohemia (and sister of Charles I), and Frederick V of Bohemia. Elisabeth’s family went into exile in The Hague after Frederick was deposed, and there is a report that Descartes spent some time at the house of Elizabeth Stuart during 1634/35 (Frederick had died in 1632). He may have met the daughter Elisabeth at that time, but his first mention of her is in a 1642 letter to their mutual friend Alphonse Pollot (also Pallotti), in which he noted her interest in his work on metaphysics (6 Oct. 1642, AT 3:577–58). In May 1643 Descartes made an unsuccessful attempt to meet with Elisabeth in The Hague. Touched by the effort, and heartened by good wishes that Pollot had passed from Descartes to her, Elisabeth sent Descartes a letter of thanks a few days later.5 In that letter, she also broached a particular problem concerning the relation of the soul to the body. She expressed this problem as follows: I ask you to tell me how the human soul can determine [determiner] the bodily spirits, to make voluntary actions (it being only a thinking thing). For it seems that all determination of motion takes place by the moved object being pushed, by the way in which it is pushed by what moves it, or by the qualification and shape of the surface of the latter. Touch is required for the first two conditions, extension for the third. You entirely exclude the latter from your notion of the soul, and the former seems to be incompatible with an immaterial thing. (6/16 May 1643, 3:661*)

It is sometimes claimed that the heterogeneity problem lies behind the difficulty that Elisabeth raised here concerning interaction.6 Notice, however, that her difficulty concerns not the general question of whether substances with distinct natures can causally interact, but the more specific question of whether the soul is able to act on the body. In particular, the question is whether something that lacks extension is able to “determine” the motion of a body by pushing it. What seems to render this sort of determination problematic is the assumption that only something that can be in contact with a body can move it.7

5. For more on Elisabeth and her interactions with Descartes, see Nye 1999; Shapiro 1999b; and Hutton 2005. 6. See, for instance, Margaret Wilson’s identification of “the difficulty of rationalizing causal relations between distinct sorts of substances” with the difficulty on which Elisabeth insisted (Wilson 1978, 215). Cf. Radner 1971; Mattern 1978; and Broughton and Mattern 1978. But cf. the claim in Shapiro 1999b that “Elisabeth’s questions of Descartes go beyond this problem” of the causal interaction of really distinct substances (506). 7. There is a question here whether Elisabeth had in mind here the technical understanding of determination in Descartes, according to which it is a modal feature of motion that can be changed apart from any change in the speed of that motion (see §3.2.1 (ii)). For the claim that she did have such an understanding in mind, see Tollefsen 1999. However, as I indicate presently, Elisabeth restated her original objection without appealing to the notion of determination, asking instead about how the soul “can move [peut mouvoir] the body” (June 10/20,

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In a subsequent letter to Descartes, Elisabeth again mentions the problem of “how the soul (nonextended and immaterial) can move the body.” However, she also introduces a new problem concerning the action of body on the soul, noting that it is “very difficult to comprehend that the soul, as you have described it, after having had the faculty and habit of reasoning well, can lose all that by some vapors, and that, being able to subsist without the body and having nothing in common with it, it is so ruled by it” (10/20 June 1643, AT 3:684–85*). Elisabeth’s claim here that the soul has “nothing in common with” the body that acts on it may seem to suggest that the heterogeneity problem is behind her new concern with interaction. Nonetheless, her worry is not merely that soul and body have distinct natures, but rather that the soul has a power of reasoning that is superior to bodily vapors, and thus should be unaffected by them. This superiority is indicated by the fact that the soul is “able to subsist without the body” in virtue of possessing this power. Elisabeth’s remarks recall Descartes’s argument in the Discourse that an immaterial soul must be invoked to explain language use. The argument appeals to the fact that we can provide the appropriate verbal responses in innumerable different circumstances in support of the claim that our language use derives from reason “as a universal instrument” rather than from the limited dispositions of our bodily organs.8 Descartes concludes that it is in virtue of possessing reason that “our soul is of a nature entirely independent of the body, and consequently is not bound to die with it” (DM V, AT 6:56–61). Elisabeth’s challenge to Descartes is to show how the reasoning of the soul can be affected by bodily vapors given that the rational soul is so superior to anything found in body. What seems to create difficulty here is the underlying assumption that an object cannot act on, and thus “rule over,” another object more perfect than it. In Elisabeth’s two letters, then, we have two different problems regarding the causal interaction of soul and body. The first is that the soul, as an unextended thing, does not have the sort of contact with body required to act on it, whereas the second is that the body, as more imperfect than a soul capable of reason, does not have the sort of perfection required to act on the soul. As we will discover, both of these difficulties with interaction have analogues in scholastic discussions, particularly in the work of Aquinas and Suárez, concerning the causal interaction of immaterial and material beings. The first difficulty is linked to the issue in scholasticism of whether a “spiritual presence” is required for spirits to move bodies (see §4.3.1), and the second to a problem in scholastic thought concerning the relation of bodily phantasms to intelligible species in the incorporeal intellect (see §4.2.1). Descartes’s response to Elisabeth focuses not so much on these particular difficulties, however, but more on the nature of the union of our soul with body. This emphasis on the union is somewhat surprising. Though Elisabeth mentioned the human soul

AT 3:684). Moreover, none of Descartes’s responses to Elisabeth appeal to this notion. As indicated in §4.3.3, however, Descartes’s views on determination are important for later Cartesian discussions of the causation of motion by finite minds. 8. Chomsky has emphasized this argument as an early version of the “poverty of stimulus” argument for innatism; see Chomsky 1966.

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in particular when expressing the problem in her initial letter concerning the action of the soul on body, the problem itself does not appear to be restricted to this particular case. For the question of whether an unextended thing can push a body would seem to apply also to God or, if an appeal to divine omnipotence solves the problem in this case, to finite spirits distinct from human souls, such as angels. Nevertheless, in his reply to Elisabeth’s initial letter, Descartes focuses on the fact that “there are two things concerning the human soul on which depend all the knowledge that we can have of its nature, the first that it thinks, the other, that being united to a body, it can act and be acted on by it [peut agir et patir avec lui] (21 May 1643, AT 3:664). He acknowledges that he said “almost nothing” (quasi rien) in his writings about the second feature of the human soul,9 but adds that we have a “primitive notion” of the union that is distinct from the primitive notion of the body alone and of the soul alone. In the case of body, we have “the notion of extension, from which follows those of shape and motion,” and in the case of the soul, we have the notion “of thought, in which are included the perceptions of the understanding and the inclinations of the will.” The notion of the union is distinctive, however, since it is that “on which depends that of the force [force] that the soul has to move [mouvoir] the body, and the body to act [d’agir] on the soul, in causing [causant] its sensations and passions” (AT 3:665). Though this passage mentions both the action of body on soul and the action of soul on body, in this letter Descartes follows the lead of Elisabeth’s initial query in focusing on the latter form of action. Thus, he emphasizes the need to refrain from conceiving “the manner in which the soul moves the body by that in which a body is moved by another body” (AT 3:666). In particular, he holds that we must refrain from thinking that the soul moves a body by means of “a real contact of surfaces” (AT 3:667). Even so, when Elisabeth subsequently protested that “it seems to me easier to concede matter and extension to the soul, than the capacity to move a body . . . to an immaterial being” (10/20 June 1643, AT 3:685*), Descartes invites her “to attribute matter and extension to the soul,” since to conceive of the soul as having this sort of extension is “nothing other than to conceive it as united to body.” Yet he also warns that the “extension of thought” that is attributed to the soul must be distinguished from the extension of matter, which unlike the extension of thought “is determined to a particular place, from which it excludes all other extension of body” (28 June 1643, AT 3:694). I will return in §4.3.2 to the positive account that Descartes offers in the correspondence with Elisabeth and elsewhere of the extension of thought, or what he elsewhere calls the extension of power. For the moment I restrict myself to a couple of observations concerning his response to Elisabeth. The first is that in attributing extension to the soul, he directly addresses Elisabeth’s initial objection that an immaterial thing does not have the sort of contact with a body required to move it. Such an attribution allows him to hold that there is in fact some sort of contact between the two, albeit not a real contact of surfaces. Though some of Descartes’s language in his

9. One puzzle, which I address in §4.1.3, is how Descartes could say that he said almost nothing about the union even though he previously argued in the Sixth Meditation that nature teaches him that he is “very closely joined and as if intermixed” with a body (see AT 7:81).

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correspondence may seem to indicate that he was merely patronizing the princess,10 on this issue, at least, he seems to me to take her objection to heart. My second observation is related to the initial impression of a confusion in Descartes of the distinct issues of the union and interaction. It seems that Descartes cannot simply claim, as he does in his letter to Elisabeth, that the conception of the soul as having a special sort of extension simply amounts to the conception of it as united to a body. For again, Elisabeth’s original objection concerns the intelligibility of the conception of the action of any immaterial thing on a body, whether or not that thing is akin to a human soul in being united to a body. If an extension of thought must be attributed to an immaterial substance to conceive its action on body, then such an extension must be attributed to all immaterial substances that can so act, including God and angels as well as human souls. Once the notion of the “extension of thought” has been distinguished from the notion of the union, though, it is natural to wonder what real work the latter is doing for Descartes. To see what work it is doing, I think it is important to deviate from Descartes’s procedure in his correspondence with Elisabeth by addressing issues that go beyond the intelligibility of interaction per se. A good place to start is with the question that Margaret Wilson has raised concerning the nature of the union that Descartes posited. Wilson’s question is whether he accepted a “natural institution theory,” on which the union simply consists in a particular kind of interaction, or rather a different sort of “co-extension theory,” on which the union involves an “intermixture” that makes possible certain correlations of mental and bodily states (Wilson 1978, 204–20). Whereas Wilson’s judgment is that the natural institution theory is most plausible for Descartes, I hope to show that despite its problems, there is at least one important respect in which the co-extension theory is superior.

4.1.2. Two Accounts of the Union As Wilson defines it, the natural institution theory holds that “what we call the close union or intermingling of this mind with this body is nothing but the arbitrarily established disposition of this mind to experience certain types of sensations on the occasion of certain changes in this body, and to refer these sensations to (parts of) this body” (Wilson 1978, 211).11 One piece of evidence for the attribution of this theory to Descartes is drawn from his remarks concerning the union in the Sixth Meditation. There Descartes claims that even though “human nature could have been so constituted by God that the same motion in the brain would exhibit something else to the mind,” still God so constituted this nature that

10. See especially his suggestion that it would be best for her to refrain from too much metaphysical meditation and to give herself over to use of the imagination and the senses (28 June 1643, AT 3:692–94). 11. Cf. the view of Baker and Morris that for Descartes our nature as a soul-body union “consists in a strict correlation between thoughts and movements of the pineal gland” (Baker and Morris 1996, 172). In opposition to the emphasis in Wilson, discussed below, of the “arbitrary” or contingent nature of the correlation, however, Baker and Morris insist that the correlations are necessary (167).

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The view that the union is an “arbitrarily established disposition” is supposed to reflect Descartes’s position that God could have constituted human nature differently than he has. Moreover, Wilson finds nothing here to indicate that the union is something more than the set of correlations between mental and bodily states that God has arbitrarily established. For a mind to be united to a body is nothing more than for it to have certain sensations follow from certain bodily “signs,” as in the case of pain, and also, presumably, to have certain motions in the brain follow from certain volitions. There is an initial question whether the evidence supports Wilson’s claim that Descartes took the correlations that constitute the union to be “arbitrary.”12 To be sure, his admission that it was within God’s power to change the connections suggests that they are contingent in some sense. However, Descartes’s emphasis in the Sixth Meditation is on the fact that the connections that God has established are “conducive to the well-being of the body” (AT 7:88). Descartes’s rejection of divine teleology commits him to the conclusion that (apart from revelation, at least) we cannot know God’s purposes for establishing the union.13 However, he seems to allow that experience can reveal the purposes that the connections involved in the union serve. In some significant sense, then, these connections are not arbitrary but are rendered intelligible by the end of the preservation of the union.14 In Wilson’s view, Descartes’s claim that motions in the brain are mere “signs” to the mind to have certain sensations indicates further the arbitrariness of the connections involved in the union.15 Below I offer a reading of this claim on which issues concerning the arbitrariness of the causal connections, or even concerning the possibility of any causal relation, do not play a central role (see §4.2.2). For the moment, though, I want to turn from the issue of the nature of the causal connections involved in the union to the implication of the natural institution theory that the union consists in nothing over and above these connections. As Wilson notes, this implication seems to conflict with Descartes’s view in the Sixth Meditation that various internal sensations “are nothing other than certain confused modes of thought arising from [ab . . . exorti] the union and the intermixture as it were [quasi permixtione] of the mind with the body” (AT 7:81). The suggestion here is that confused thought is not

12. In addition to Wilson 1978, 209 and 211, see Wilson 1999b, 43 and 57; and Wilson 1999c, 480. 13. See my discussion of this point in §2.1.2 (ii.b); cf. chapter 2, note 34. 14. For a similar criticism of Wilson, see Loeb 2005, 67–69. In §4.2.3, however, I criticize Loeb’s concession to Wilson that the connections involved in the union are “brute.” See Simmons 2001 for an emphasis on the teleological nature of Descartes’s explanation of sensation. 15. Cf. Wilson 1978, 207, and Wilson 1999b, 43.

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merely a constituent feature of the union, but also something that, as arising from the union, is an effect of it.16 Wilson takes this suggestion to lead us to what she has called the co-extension theory, on which the mind has a special sort of presence in the body that is a prerequisite for the production of states of the union. With respect to this theory, Wilson highlights Descartes’s claim, cited previously, that his correspondent Elisabeth should feel free to attribute extension to the soul, since to do so is “nothing other than to conceive it as united to body” (AT 3:694). So also, in a passage from the Sixth Replies related to this claim, Descartes draws an analogy between the human soul and the scholastic real quality of heaviness that “while it remained coextensive with the heavy body, it could exercise its power at any part of it” (AT 7:442; see §4.3.2). According to the co-extension theory, then, the experience of the union is not restricted to the experience of certain states associated with it. Rather, as Wilson notes, “we experience the co-extensiveness of mind throughout the body . . . and (perhaps by this very fact) experience something called the mind–body union” (Wilson 1978, 216). I have some sympathy for Wilson’s conclusion that the co-extension theory is problematic for Descartes. Whereas the problem that she emphasizes is that co-extension does not seem to render mind–body interaction intelligible (Wilson 1978, 215),17 the problem I find is that the sort of co-extension he posits in the correspondence with Elisabeth is not clearly relevant to the special intermixture that he takes to be present in the union. As indicated in §4.1.1, Descartes there invokes the extension of thought to address Elisabeth’s worries about how any immaterial thing could move a body. Neither these worries nor the purported solution seems to concern the distinctive sort of connection present in the case of the relation of the human soul to its body.18 Moreover, the implication of the “heaviness analogy” that the soul is present wherever it can act on the body does not support the view that it is co-extended with the whole of the body to which it is united. For Descartes makes clear in the Passions of the Soul that “there is a certain part of the body where [the human soul] exercises its functions more particularly than in others,” namely, the pineal gland (PS I.31, AT 11:352). It seems to follow from the fact that the soul is extended only where it can act that it is co-extended merely with this specific part of the brain, and not with the human body as a whole.19

16. See also the claim in the Sixth Replies that sensations “arise from” (oriri ex) the union (AT 7:437). But cf. Loeb 1981, 131–32, n.9, for an attempt to argue that there is no serious suggestion in Descartes that mind and body interact in a certain manner in virtue of the union. Here I follow Wilson in thinking that there is evidence of such a suggestion in Descartes. The implications of my interpretive differences with Loeb on this point are revealed in §4.2.3. 17. Cf. Rozemond 2005, 360–62. 18. For a similar objection, see Rozemond 2005, 350, 356. 19. It is possible that Descartes simply confuses the co-extension required for the soul’s direct action on the body with the co-extension that derives from the fact that the body with which the soul interacts has parts that must be interconnected to sustain the union. In fact, the article containing the passage from the Passions just quoted is immediately preceded by an article in which Descartes emphasizes the sort of co-extension that involves the unified nature of the human body (PS I.30, AT 11:351).

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Finally, the heaviness analogy appears to be irrelevant to the portion of the union, to which Descartes himself draws Elisabeth’s attention, that concerns the “force” of the human body “to act [d’agir] on the soul, in causing [causant] its sensations and passions” (AT 3:665). But this sort of force seems to be essential for the kind of intermixture posited in the Sixth Meditation insofar as Descartes is concerned in this passage with the fact that the human soul has certain confused sensations of its body. To be sure, he does note, in comments on this passage in the Sixth Replies, that such sensations arise “from the fact that the mind is so intimately conjoined with the brain [cerebro]” (AT 7:437). As in the case of the action of the soul on body, so too, it seems, the action of body on soul requires that the agent be in some sort of contact with the patient. Nevertheless, Descartes emphasizes that the conception of the action of the quality of heaviness is drawn from the conception of the action of the soul on body (see §4.3.2). Given this emphasis, the former conception cannot contribute to an explication of the force of the body to act on the soul in sensation. In spite of its very real drawbacks, the co-extension theory does reflect what I take to be Descartes’s considered view that the union consists in more than a certain set of correlations between mental and bodily states. The extension of the human soul is supposed to allow it to have the sort of presence required for it to move the body. So also, it seems, the union of the soul with the brain is needed for certain motions there to be able to cause certain sensations in the soul. Even if the extension of thought that Descartes mentions in his letter to Elisabeth cannot be identified with the union, then, at least it is similar to the union in being a prerequisite for interaction. Admittedly, Descartes is not entirely clear on what precisely the union is supposed to be when it is distinguished from the particular states it produces. The claim in the correspondence with Elisabeth that we have a primitive notion of the union akin to primitive notions of thought and extension may seem to indicate that the union is similar to thought and extension in being a principal attribute of a substance. This impression is strengthened by Descartes’s comment in a 1642 letter to Regius that “the mind is united in a real and substantial manner to the body” so that it forms with the body a true ens per se (Jan. 1642, AT 3:493).20 But though it is tempting to think that Descartes at least entertained a “trialism” on which the union is a created substance along with mind and body,21 ultimately it seems that he cannot accept such a position. Perhaps the most serious problem for trialism derives from Descartes’s claim in the Synopsis to the Meditations that all created substances are

20. In an earlier letter, Descartes advises Regius to hold in his dispute with Voetius that body and soul are “incomplete substances” in relation to the human being and thus constitute an ens per se when joined (Dec. 1641, AT 3:460). See also Descartes’s remarks in the Fourth Replies at AT 7:222–23. 21. Indeed, I succumbed to this temptation in Schmaltz 1992a. For a trenchant critique of my view in this article, see Rozemond 1998, 191–203. But cf. the defense of the view that Descartes’s union involves a unified substance in Hoffman 1986 and 1999. I borrow the term ‘trialism’ from Cottingham 1985, though Cottingham’s claim is that Descartes added the third category of the union “without proceeding to reify it as a separate substance” (Cottingham 1985, 229).

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“incorruptible, and cannot cease to be unless they are reduced to nothing by God’s withholding his concursus from them” (AT 7:14).22 The problem is that he indicated in the same passage that the human body, and thus the union, “can very easily perish” by natural means. But since Descartes claims that everything produced naturally derives from God’s ordinary concursus, the implication here is that the union can be destroyed even when God continues to offer this concursus, and so cannot properly be said to constitute a substance. If Descartes’s union does not constitute a substance, however, in what sense is it something that is distinct from and explains the correlations between mental and bodily states of the human being? A clue to the answer is provided in the Passions, in a section entitled “how the soul and the body act on each other.” There Descartes claims that whereas the union involves a soul “whose nature is such that it receives . . . as many different perceptions as different motions occur in [the pineal] gland,” it also involves a body the mechanism of which “is so constructed that simply by the gland’s being moved in any way by the soul . . . it drives the surrounding spirits toward the pores of the brain, which direct them through the nerves to the muscles; and in this way the gland makes the spirits move the limbs” (PS I.34, AT 11:355). In the case of the union, the correlations between mental and bodily states are to be explained in terms of the coordinated natures of the human soul and the bodily mechanism to which that soul is united. Given that the soul and body possess these natures, certain motions in the brain can produce certain sensations in the soul, and certain volitions in the soul can produce certain motions in the brain. This explanation of the correlations involved in the union may seem to conflict with Descartes’s occasional suggestion that there is not much that can be said about the union itself. There is, for instance, his claim to Elisabeth that “what belongs to the union of the soul and the body is known only obscurely by the intellect alone or even by the intellect aided by the imagination, but is known very clearly by the senses.” Thus the conception of the union derives from “the ordinary course of life and conversation, and abstention from meditation and from the study of things that exercise the imagination” (28 June 1643, AT 3:692). Moreover, he writes later to Arnauld that the fact that a mind united to a body can act on it “is shown us not by reasoning or comparison with other things, but by the most certain and most evident everyday experience” (29 July 1648, AT 5:222). So isn’t Descartes’s view that there is no need for an explanation of the union apart from an appeal to the fact that we just feel it? The problem here, I think, is that Descartes is not always careful to distinguish the fact of the union from the explanation of this fact. Certainly his view is that immediate sense experience is the best source of our knowledge of the fact of the union. But though he presented this experience as yielding a full primitive notion of the union, in the correspondence with Elisabeth, or a complete understanding of the action of our mind on our body, in the letter to Arnauld, his remarks elsewhere in

22. As I indicated in §3.1.3, this claim is related to the position, added to the French edition of the Principles, that created substances are such that they “need only the ordinary concourse [concourse ordinaire] of God” to exist (PP I.51, AT 9-2:47).

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these same texts indicate that more is required. For in the correspondence with Elisabeth, he appeals to the fact that the notion of the union include the notions of “the force that the soul has to move the body” and the force of “the body to act on the soul, in causing its sensations and passions” (AT 3:665), and it would seem that these forces are theoretical posits that go beyond what it revealed in immediate sense experience. Likewise, in the letter to Arnauld, Descartes follows up on his claim that the action of mind on body is immediately evident by attempting to explain this action in terms of the heaviness analogy that he had used previously for this same purpose (AT 5:222–23). Such an explanation seems to go beyond our immediate experience of our action insofar as it concerns the underlying source of that action.23 Even so, some of Descartes’s remarks draw attention to the distinctive nature of the states of the union that are immediately evident in our sense experience. Thus, in his “proof ” of the union in the Sixth Meditation there is an emphasis on the fact that the “intermixture” of mind and body yields “confused” sensations such as hunger and thirst that differ phenomenologically from the clear perceptions that a pure intellect would have of the body (AT 7:81). Though to my knowledge Descartes never characterized the volitions by which the human soul moves its body as confused in a similar manner, the passage from the Passions quoted previously suggests that there is something distinctive about them insofar as they depend for their efficacy on the construction of the bodily mechanism. Before turning to the details of Descartes’s account of the kinds of interaction that the union involves, I want to consider his view of how the union is reflected in the sensory and volitional states to which we have access in basic sense experience.

4.1.3. Sensation and Human Volition In response to Arnauld’s objection that his dualism suggests the “Platonic opinion” that a human being is “a soul using a body” (Fourth Objections, AT 7:203), Descartes claims that the argument that he used in the Sixth Meditation to show that the human mind is “substantially united” with the body is “as strong as any I have read” (Fourth Replies, AT 7:228). In this argument he appeals to the “teaching of nature” that he has “sensations of pain, hunger, thirst, etc.,” and so is “not only present in my body as a sailor in a ship, but most closely conjoined and as it were intermixed with it, so that I form a unit with it” (AT 7:81). The image of the sailor in the ship derives from Aristotle, who used it to characterize a Platonic view of the relation between the soul and body.24 Descartes therefore indeed attempted to distance himself from a Platonic conception of the human being. What is supposed to show that he is not merely using

23. Cf. Wilson’s observation that “the senses could hardly be supposed to tell us—‘in the ordinary course of life,’ as Descartes adds—that brain states give rise to mind states according to correlations instituted by nature” (Wilson 1999b, 58). Wilson is here criticizing Richardson’s view that Descartes’s remarks in the Elisabeth correspondence indicate that mind–body interaction is an irreducible theoretical primitive (see Richardson 1982, 25–26; see also Richardson 1985). 24. See De Anima II.1, 413a8, Aristotle 1984, 1:657.

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a body is that when his body is damaged or needs food or drink, he does not merely “expressly understand” that this is so, but rather perceives it by means of the “confused sensations” of pain, hunger, and thirst. As he indicates in a letter to Regius, the inference here is that these sensations are not “pure thoughts of a mind distinct from a body,” but rather “confused perceptions of a mind really united to a body” (Jan. 1642, AT 3:493). In this same letter, Descartes illustrates the difference between a purely intellectual mind and the embodied soul by noting that “if an angel were in a human body, it would not have sensations as we do, but would simply perceive the motions that are caused by external objects, and in this way would differ from a real man” (AT 3:493). Though this passage may seem to leave open the possibility that the angelic perception of the motions, as well as the motions themselves, have bodily causes, in fact Descartes is committed to the conclusion that bodies cannot act on disembodied minds. His official position in the Principles is that everything in the mind that does not pertain to it solely as an intellectual thinking thing must be “referred to” (ad . . . referri) the “close and intimate union of our mind with the body” (PP I.48, AT 8-1:23).25 Moreover, he makes clear in the Fifth Replies that “the brain cannot in any way be employed in pure understanding [pure intelligendum], but only in imagining and sensing” (AT 7:358).26 For him, a mind not united to a body could have only pure intellect, and thus would have no perceptions that derive from the force of the body to act on the mind. Despite Descartes’s claim in the Principles that all of his confused sensations must be “referred to” the union, his Sixth Meditation proof of the union emphasizes only a certain class of such sensations, namely, his “internal sensations” of states of his own body. One natural question is why this argument focuses on these sensations to the exclusion of external sensations of sensible qualities such as colors, sounds, and tastes.27 As Alison Simmons has shown, the answer is that internal sensations such as those of pain, hunger, and thirst lead the soul to regard a particular body as its own.28 Descartes’s emphasis in the Sixth Meditation passage is on the fact that a pure intellect that had merely an explicit understanding of the body could not associate itself with the body in the same way. But it seems that even a soul that had in addition to such an understanding confused external sensations of the sensible

25. The French edition says that such mental elements must be “attributed to” (atribuées à) the union (AT 9-2:45). 26. As Wilson notes, this feature of Descartes’s dualism distinguishes it from versions of Cartesian dualism in contemporary discussions that require only that mental states are not identical to bodily states, and thus allow for the thoroughgoing correlation of such states (Wilson 1978, 180). 27. For the distinction between internal and external sensation, see PP IV.190–98, AT 8-1:316–23. In this text internal sensations are lumped together with the passions and distinguished from external sensations, whereas in the later Passions there is a threefold distinction of perceptions referred to external bodies (external sensations), perceptions referred to our own body (internal sensations), and perceptions referred to our own soul (passions) (PS I.22–25, AT 11:345–48). 28. See Simmons forthcoming.

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qualities of its body could no more become attached to this body than it could to any other body it perceives by means of such sensations. Thus it is not only the fact that the internal sensations are confused that reveals the union with a body, but also the fact that they are confused in a way that produces in the soul a sense that it “forms a unit” with that body. It is important that the teaching of nature is here restricted to our sense that we form a unit with a body. There is no claim that nature teaches us how it is so united. The absence of such a claim helps to explain Descartes’s admission to Elisabeth that he said “almost nothing” in his previous writings, including his Meditations, about our knowledge that our soul is such by nature “that being united to a body, it can act and be acted on by it” (AT 3:665). Though we have seen that he was not always clear on this point, his suggestion in this passage is that he has provided no explanation of how the mind is able to be united with the body so as to have the states revealed by his immediate sense experience.29 Such an explanation requires a further analysis of the kind of “forces” that underlie the union. Though the Sixth Meditation proof of the union emphasizes the importance of our internal sensations, Descartes indicates in his letter to Elisabeth—in line with his official doctrine in the Principles—that all sensations and passions derive from the union. Moreover, he claims in this letter that the primitive notion of the union includes the notion of the force of the soul to move the body. Yet there is the suggestion in the Discourse that the volitions that produce bodily motions are not as clearly connected to the union as the sensory states that the body produces. Descartes writes in this text that it does not suffice that the [rational] soul is lodged in the human body as a pilot in a ship, except perhaps in order to move its limbs, but it must be joined and united to it more closely in order to have, in addition, sensations and appetites similar to ours, and thus compose a true man. (DM V, AT 6:59; emphasis mine)

As noted below, Descartes insists in his late correspondence with More that God and angels, as well as human souls, can move bodies (see §4.3.2). Since he extends the power to move bodies to disembodied minds, Descartes has reason to conclude that the mere fact that the soul can move its limbs does not clearly reveal that it is closely joined to the body it moves. And given that he denies that disembodied minds have the confused sensations that derive from bodily action on the mind, he has reason to take our experience of such states to reveal the close union of our soul with our body. Nevertheless, the volition to move bodies that Descartes posited in the case of human souls seems to have a feature that distinguishes it from the corresponding kind of volition in disembodied minds. To see the difference, consider again his view in the Passions that though it is united to the whole body, the human soul “exercises its functions more particularly” in the pineal gland (PS I.31, AT 11:352). To move

29. See also Descartes’s claim, added to the 1647 French edition of the Meditations, that his response to Gassendist objections to the possibility of the interaction of human souls with bodies “presuppose an explication of the union of the human soul with the body, with which I have not yet dealt” (AT 9-1:213).

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any part of our body, then, we must act on this gland in a particular manner.30 But it is no part of Descartes’s view that this action is brought about by a volition that has the change in the gland as part of its intentional content. He indicates that we move our arm by willing this motion, not by willing a change in our pineal gland. In contrast, presumably, a disembodied mind would need to will that a change occur in this gland to produce that same effect. The implication in Descartes that human volition need not include its immediate effect in its intentional content tends to undermine Bernard Williams’ puzzling argument that Cartesian interactionism is unsatisfactory given that “one’s control over one’s body could not be understood as internal, localized psychokinesis” (Williams 1978, 289). Williams’ assumption is that Descartes’s view that we can move our arm only by acting on our pineal gland commits him to the conclusion that we can produce this internal action directly by a kind of psychokinesis. However, Williams himself admits that Descartes allowed that there are certain changes that I cannot produce by directly willing, such as the dilation of my pupils (290). Why couldn’t Descartes hold that changes in the pineal gland are among those that I cannot produce by directly willing? Indeed, it seems that this is just what Descartes does hold, and so he is not committed by his account of human volition to the existence in the case of our voluntary motion of a kind of psychokinesis.31 We have considered the view in Descartes that the union gives rise to sensory representations of states of our own body—such as those present in the cases of our sensations of pain, hunger, and thirst—that are confused in the sense that they fail to yield an “explicit understanding” of the nature of those states. Though he did not speak in these terms, it seems that he also could say that the union includes volitions to move our body that are confused in a related sense, since their content does not reveal the nature of their immediate effects in the brain. These “confused” volitions can nonetheless produce their intended effects in virtue of the special nature of the human body. As Descartes tells Arnauld, although we are conscious of the action by which our soul brings about a certain change in the brain, the fact that it produces this change is due to “the appropriate way in which the body is constructed, of which the mind may not be aware” (29 July 1648, AT 5:222). And even if we were aware of this construction through the study of anatomy, we still could not produce the change in the brain by willing it directly (thus the impossibility in our case of internal psychokinesis). Given that our soul is united to a body, according to Descartes, the only way in which we can bring about the right sort of change in our brain is by producing a volition for some effect, such as the motion of our arm, which volition itself brings about that change due to the nature of the union.

30. As we will discover in §4.3.3, there is some dispute over whether Descartes held that we act on the gland by moving it or merely by “determining” its motion. 31. Williams’ claim that for psychokinesis to be possible it must be possible “for mind to influence matter separate from it” (Williams 1978, 289) suggests that he takes psychokinetic action to involve action at a distance, or at least action without any sort of immediate presence of the mind to that on which it acts. As indicated in §4.3.2, however, there is reason to think that Descartes would deny that any sort of mind-to-body action is psychokinetic in this sense.

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Later occasionalists cite the fact that we often do not know how we produce the bodily effects we will in support of the conclusion that we do not have the power to move our body. Thus, Malebranche argues as follows in his 1674/75 Search after Truth: For how could we move our arms? To move them, it is necessary to have animal spirits, to send them through certain nerves toward certain muscles in order to inflate and contract them, for it is thus that the arm attached to them is moved. And we see that men who do not know that they have spirits, nerves, and muscles move their arms, and even move them with more skill and ease than those who know anatomy best. Therefore, men will to move their arms, and only God is able and knows how to move them. (Bk. VI-2, ch. 3, Malebranche 1958–84, 2:315/Malebranche 1997, 449–50)

Here the insistence that causal power requires knowledge of its exercise is limited to the case of mind-to-body action. But in True Metaphysics (Metaphysica vera), published posthumously in 1691, the Flemish Cartesian Arnold Geulincx cites as a general causal principle that “it is impossible that one make what one does not know how to make” (impossible ese, ut is faciat, qui nescit quomodo fiat) (Geulincx 1891–93, 2:150). It also seems to be in line with Geulincx’s position that there must be, in addition to knowledge of how to make the effect, an efficacious volition to produce what is necessary to bring about that effect. In the case of our action on the pineal gland, though, we have no such volition. And according to Geulincx’s principle, if we cannot have this sort of volition (either because we do not know the means or because we could not directly will them if we did know them), we cannot produce the effect. However, Descartes takes it to be a distinctive feature of human volition that it can immediately produce an effect in a body that it does not know how to make, or at least that is not included in its intentional content, due to the fact that the human soul is united to that body. This union is supposed to confer a special sort of force on this volition that it would not have apart from the union. It is this sort of force, presumably, that the volition of a disembodied mind would lack. Of course, one could take Geulincx’s principle to show that the human soul cannot possess a force of this kind. But Descartes’s comment to Arnauld that our “most certain and most evident experience” proves that such volitions in fact move our body indicates that he would take this experience to reveal as well the falsity of Geulincx’s principle. This is not the end of the matter, however, since we still have Elisabeth’s worry that an unextended thing does not have what is required to move a body. As I have emphasized, this worry concerns not just the special sort of volitions involved in the union, but mind-to-body action as such. If I am correct in thinking that Descartes is committed to denying that body can produce perceptions in a disembodied mind, there is no problem for body-to-mind action that extends beyond the union. But there is still the worry, again from Elisabeth, that something as imperfect as body could not have an effect on any mind capable of rational thought. To reinforce the purported dictate of experience that the human soul interacts with its body in a special manner, Descartes needs to address these different problems concerning body-tomind and mind-to-body action.

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4.2. BODY-TO-MIND ACTION I have noted the claim of Descartes’s critics that his troubles with mind–body interaction derive from a heterogeneity problem that applies equally to the cases of bodyto-mind and mind-to-body action. In contrast, I start here with a problem with interaction in the work of the scholastics, and more specifically the writings of Aquinas and Suárez, that pertains exclusively to the case of body-to-mind action. Then I turn to the version of this scholastic problem in Descartes’s account of the causation of sensation. Here I emphasize his startling claim in a late text that motions in the brain merely “give occasion” to the mind to form its own sensory ideas by means of a faculty innate to it. In contrast to commentators who see this passage as deriving from a recognition in Descartes of the impossibility of the action of body on mind, however, I argue that Descartes attempts to retain the view that body is some (albeit special) sort of efficient cause of sensation. In so doing, I set myself apart not only from occasionalist readings of Descartes’s account of body-to-mind action, but also from Steven Nadler’s recent claim that he posited an “occasional causation” distinct in kind from efficient causation. Whereas Nadler sees Descartes as denying that occasional causation derives from any real power in the occasional cause, I find in the Cartesian texts the suggestion that the occasional connection between motions and sensations is grounded in divinely instituted natures. The fact that I find such a suggestion in Descartes explains my resistance to the view in the literature that he took mind–body interaction to involve “brute” psychophysical laws that lie outside the scope of natural philosophy. On my reading, then, Descartes does not in the end entirely reject the scholastic understanding of psychology as a science of the soul.

4.2.1. The Scholastic Problem In a discussion of Descartes’s views on the action of body on mind in sensation, Marleen Rozemond has drawn attention to the importance of a scholastic problem with interaction that I wish to emphasize here.32 As Rozemond indicates, this problem pertains not to the case of sensation as such, but rather to the relation of sensation to intellectual acts. To be sure, in his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas broached a possible problem for the conclusion that the body acts on the mind in sensation when he noted the view, which he attributed to Plato, that “the soul is somehow excited so as to form sensible species in itself.” He further noted, cautiously, that Augustine “seems to touch on” the opinion of Plato, citing his claim that “the body does not feel, but the soul through the body, which it uses as a kind of messenger to form [ad formandum] in itself what is announced from without” (ST I.84.6).33 However, Thomas countered with the Aristotelian position that sensation is a passive feature of the soul-body composite, rather than an activity of the human soul. Since the sensible object actually possesses the sensory form that the bodily

32. Rozemond 1999; cf. Rozemond 1998, 178–79. 33. This passage, cited in ST I.84.6, is from Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram, pt. XII, ch. 24.

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senses possess only potentially, this object is able to actualize this form when it acts on the senses.34 This is not the end of the story, however, insofar as Aquinas also endorsed the argument, which he took to be common to Plato and Aristotle, that since the intellect has an operation more perfect than anything found in a body, and thus is more noble than body, nothing bodily can act on it (ST I.84.6).35 Bodily operations can produce sensible species in the sense organs, and these species can lead to the production of phantasms in the imagination. But on their own, those phantasms cannot produce corresponding “intelligible species” in the intellect. The problem here, as Aquinas expressed it, is that “in order to cause an intellectual operation, according to Aristotle, an impression of sensible bodies is not enough, but something more noble is required, because what acts is more noble than what is passive, as he himself says” (ST I.84.6). In opposition to the view in Plato that these “more noble” elements are the separate intelligible Forms that illumine the intellect, Aquinas posited an “agent intellect,” a power of the intellect to impress intelligible species in itself (ST I.79.3). Because the activity of the agent intellect is required to produce the intelligible species, “it cannot be said that sensible knowledge is the total and perfect cause of intellectual knowledge” (ST I.84.6). Even so, Aquinas insisted that intellectual knowledge must be “caused by” the senses, and thus that the phantasms must be at least “in a way the matter of the cause” (ST I.84.6). This requirement derives from Aquinas’s commitment to the position that human intellectual knowledge, as opposed to the knowledge of separate intellects such an angels, depends essentially on sensory operations. In particular, this dependence is reflected in the fact that the agent intellect can produce species only by a process of abstracting intelligible content from phantasms. Phantasms are thus “the matter of the cause” in the sense that they provide the material for abstraction. As he expressed the point in Questions on Truth (Quæstiones de Veritate), a phantasm is an “instrumental and secondary agent” (agens instrumentale et secundarium) that provides a model for the production of intelligible species by the agent intellect as “principal and primary agent” (agens principale et primum) (QT X.6, ad 7, TA 14:554). In effect, then, Aquinas was trying to find a middle way between the position that phantasms are total causes of intelligible species and the view that they play no causal role in the formation of these species. This was only one of a number of accounts of intellectual cognition offered in the later medieval period, which ranged from the Platonist view of James of Viterbo, on which phantasms merely trigger the 34. There is a debate in a series of articles in Philosophical Review over whether Aquinas took the reception of the sensible species to be merely a “physical event,” or whether it involves in addition some “spiritual” change; see Cohen 1982, which defends the former position; Haldane 1983, which defends the latter position; and Hoffman 1990, which attempts to split the difference. 35. In ST I.75.2, Thomas argued that intellectual cognition cannot be an operation of a bodily organ, since such cognition has universal scope whereas the bodily operations have a more determinate nature. This line of argument is strikingly similar to Descartes’s argument in the Discourse, mentioned in §4.1.1, that since the reason involved in language use is a “universal instrument,” it cannot be explained in terms of the limited dispositions of bodily organs.

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production of inborn intelligible species, to the nominalist view of Durandus, on which phantasms produce intellectual cognition directly, without the mediation of agent intellect or intelligible species.36 However, Thomas’s influence seems to be reflected in the position of our main scholastic, Suárez, that a phantasm “instrumentally attains to the production of an intelligible species” (MD XVII.2, ¶11, 1:586). Since this text defines an instrumental cause as an efficient cause that “concurs in or is elevated to the effecting of something more noble than itself” (¶17, 1:590), the suggestion here, as in Aquinas, is that the phantasm is a real though subordinate efficient cause of the species. However, Rozemond draws attention to the much less causally robust role that Suárez attributed to the phantasm in his commentary on De Anima.37 In this text, he did allow that the phantasm “concurs in some mode in the production of the [intelligible] species” (DA IV.2, ¶4, Opera 3:716*). Yet Suárez also emphasized there—in direct opposition to the views of Thomas and the Thomists38—that since the phantasm is corporeal, and thus cannot act on something spiritual, it “concurs not effectively [effective] but materially to the production of the species, and the agent intellect alone effects it” (¶10, Opera 3:719*). Earlier in this text Suárez had described the phantasm as “only a prerequisite, or as the exciting occasion [occasio excitans], or as exemplar, or at most, as instrument elevated by the spiritual light of the same soul” (DA I.11, ¶21, Opera 3:550*). This passage does leave open the possibility of describing the phantasm as an instrument for the production of the species. Yet the more dominant suggestion there is that it is an “exciting occasion” that serves merely as a prerequisite for the efficient causal activity of the agent intellect.39 Interestingly, Suárez distanced himself from Thomas even when purporting to be hewing to the Thomistic line. Thus, after citing with approval Thomas’s denial that the phantasm is a “total and perfect cause” of intellectual cognition, Suárez noted his own view that the phantasm is related to the intelligible species as the inner senses are related to the appetitive power. Yet earlier he had claimed that “apprehension is

36. On Viterbo, see Spruit 1994–95, 1:238–40; on Durandus, see Spruit 1994–95, 1:281–83. 37. See the discussion in Rozemond 1999, 440–44; cf. Spruit 1994–95, 2:301–305. Neither Rozemond nor Spruit notes the apparent tension between the views in De Anima and the Metaphysical Disputations. Though De Anima was first published in 1622, twenty-five years after the Disputations, it is based on work that predates the later text. It may be, then, that Suárez’s thought shifted toward a more Thomistic position. Or it might be that the view in the Disputations is less in line with such a position than it initially appears to be, and thus that Suárez’s thinking on this issue was more consistently anti-Thomistic than I have allowed. Thanks to James South for discussion of this issue. 38. See, for instance, his critique of the view of Cajetan and the Thomistae that “phantasms are united with the agent intellect as an instrument with its principal agent” (DA IV.2, ¶¶6-7, Opera, 717–18*), and his critique of the view in Thomas that the phantasm must serve as some sort of efficient cause of the species (DA IV.2, ¶13, Opera 3:720*). For discussion of various later Thomistic developments of Thomas’s account of the relation of the phantasm to intelligible species, see Spruit 1994–95, 1:360–85, and 2:111–28, 274–93. 39. For a comparison of the uses of occasionalist terminology in the work of Descartes and various scholastic authors, see Specht 1966, chs. 1–3, as well as Specht 1971 and 1972.

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required, not as an efficient cause, but as an application to the object” (DA V.3, ¶8, Opera 3:760*).40 Moreover, just prior to the citation of the passage from Thomas, Suárez insisted that the contribution of the phantasm to intellectual cognition “does not occur by way of any influx of the phantasm itself, but by providing the matter and as it were an exemplar to the agent intellect in virtue of the union that they both have in the same soul” (DA IV.2, ¶12, Opera 3:719*). But Suárez’s official view is that causation is “nothing other than that influx, or concursus by which each cause in its kind actually flows being into the effect” (MD XII.2, ¶13, 1:387*). Given his denial of any influx of the phantasm in the production of the intelligible species, Suárez is committed to the conclusion, not to be found in Thomas, that the phantasm plays no efficient causal role in this production.41 Though Aquinas and Suárez agreed that the phantasm cannot be the total efficient cause of intelligible species, then, they offered different accounts of the manner in which it is related to the intellect. For Thomas, the phantasm is still a true efficient cause, albeit a “secondary and instrumental” one, that determines the content of the intelligible species. At least in De Anima, however, Suárez gave the impression that the phantasm is a noncausal occasion for the production of the species and that the agent intellect is their sole secondary efficient cause. The scholastic problem of the relation of the phantasm of the soul-body composite to intellectual cognition does not arise for Descartes. He replaces the phantasm with two distinct “grades” of sensation, the first of which consists in “nothing but the motion of the particles of the [sense] organs, and any change of shape and position resulting from this motion,” and the second of which consists in “all the immediate effects produced in the mind as a result of its being united with a bodily organ that is affected in this way” (Sixth Replies, AT 7:437). Nonetheless, the scholastic problem is similar to a problem that arises for Descartes’s account of the “immediate effects” of the union. For just as Aquinas and Suárez had to explain how changes in an incorporeal intellect are related to a corporeal phantasm, so Descartes has to explain how sensory modes of an immaterial mind can result from bodily motions. Moreover, we will discover presently that Descartes speaks at times of motions as “giving occasion” to the mind to form sensory ideas, thus recalling Suárez’s talk of phantasms as the “exciting occasion” for the production of intelligible species by the agent intellect. The link to the scholastic problem is reinforced by the fact that Descartes’s containment axiom seems to create difficulties for body-to-mind action that do not apply to the case of mind-to-body action. The Platonic axiom in Thomas and Suárez that the less perfect cannot act on the more perfect precludes only the action of body on intellect, not the action of intellect on body. Similarly, Descartes’s requirement that the “total” or “adequate” cause must contain its effects “formally or eminently” applies asymmetrically to the cases of mind and body. As I noted in chapter 2,

40. Suárez cites Aquinas’s account in ST I.82.4 of how the intellect moves the will, though there is no indication in the cited text that the apprehension of an object cannot serve as an efficient cause of an appetite. 41. For this point about Suárez, I am indebted to the discussion in Rozemond 1999, 440–44.

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Descartes’s account of eminent containment allows for minds to so contain bodily effects, but not for bodies to so contain mental effects (see §2.1.3 (ii)). Thus, total bodily causes must formally contain their mental effects. I also suggested in this chapter that there is a sense in which bodily causes could formally contain the “objective reality” of sensory ideas. However, it seems that they cannot so contain everything in sensations, and in particular not those features of the sensations that do not resemble what is in bodies (see §2.1.3 (i)). So just as the scholastics had to confront the question of how intellectual aspects of the intelligible species that go beyond the corporeal can derive from the phantasm, so Descartes has to confront the question of how mental aspects of sensations that go beyond what can be found in bodies can nonetheless result from motions in the brain. But though Descartes’s use of occasionalist terminology may seem to indicate an affinity to Suárez’s more radical views, I hope to show that he is in fact closer to Aquinas in attempting to make room for a genuine causal role for body in sensation.

4.2.2. Sensation in the Comments Perhaps Descartes’s most provocative remarks on the causation of sensation are found in his 1648 Comments on a Certain Broadsheet (Notae in Programma quoddam). The “broadsheet” in question is that of Henricus Regius (1598–1679), once the primary exponent of the new Cartesian philosophy at the University of Utrecht. Though Descartes had previously befriended Regius, their relationship took a turn for the worse with the publication in 1646 of Regius’s Fundamenta physices.42 Descartes complained in the preface to the French edition of the Principles that in the Fundamenta his former disciple erred in denying “certain truths of metaphysics on which the whole of physics must be based” (AT 9-2, 20). Regius responded in 1647 by publishing anonymously a pamphlet, entitled “An account of the human mind, or rational soul, where it is explained what it is, and what it can be,” in which he outlined his position on the nature and knowledge of mind and body. The Comments is Descartes’s point-by-point response to the twenty-one theses offered in this pamphlet.43 Regius declared in the twelfth thesis of his pamphlet that the mind is devoid of “ideas, or notions, or axioms that are innate,” and he concluded in the thirteenth that “all common notions that are engraved in the mind have their origin in observation

42. Regius held a chair in medicine at the University of Utrecht. Descartes had defended Regius when Gisbertius Voetius, the rector of the university, attempted to remove him from his chair on the grounds that his views were heretical. In an open letter to Voetius, published in 1643, Descartes said that he was so confident of Regius’s intelligence that any view of Regius could be attributed to him (AT 8-2:163). This contrasts sharply with the charge of plagiarism, and inaccurate plagiarism at that, in the preface to the Principles (AT 9-2:19), in a 1646 letter to Mersenne (AT 4:508–11), and in the Comments (AT 8-2:365). For more on the exchange between Regius and Descartes, see Verbeek 1993. 43. In this work, Descartes responded also to some of the objections to his system provided in Consideratio theologica, a pamphlet published by a theologian at Utrecht, Jacobus Revius, whose critique of Descartes is discussed in §3.1.3, at note 37.

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of things or in verbal instruction” (AT 8-2:345). In response, Descartes takes exception, in particular, to the purported suggestion in Regius that “the faculty of thought is not able to accomplish anything by itself, could never perceive or think anything except what it receives [accipit] from observation or tradition, that is, from the senses.” He adds that whoever correctly considers how far our senses extend, and what it is precisely that is able to come [pervenire] to our faculty of thought from them, must admit that in no case do they exhibit to us ideas of things, just as we form them in thought. So much so that nothing is in our ideas which is not innate to the mind, or to the faculty of thinking [nihil sit in nostris ideis, quod menti, sive cogitandi facultati, non fuerit innatum], except only those circumstances that pertain to experience: such as that we judge that these or those ideas, which we now have present to our thought, are referred to certain things placed outside us. (AT 8-2:359)

The material for judgments relating to experience does not consist of ideas that the sense organs “transmit to our mind through the sense organs” (nostrae menti per organa sensuum immiserunt). Rather, these organs “transmit something that gives occasion to itself [i.e., the mind] to form [the ideas], at this time rather than another, by means of a faculty innate to it” (aliquid immiserunt, quod dedit occasionem ad ipsas, per innatum sibi facultatem, hoc tempore potius quam alio, efformandas). Descartes explains that “nothing approaches [accedit] our mind from external objects through the sense organs, except certain motions.” Citing the discussion in the 1637 Dioptrics, he asserts that the figures arising from bodily motions “are not conceived by us just as they are in the sense organs,” and concludes from this fact that the ideas of motions and figures themselves are innate to us. And so much the more must the ideas of pain, colours, sounds and the like be innate, so that our mind is able, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions [occasione quorundam motuum corporeorum], to exhibit them to itself; for they have no likeness [simultudinem] to corporeal motions. (AT 8-2:359)

Before considering the precise import of the claim that bodily motions merely “give occasion” for an innate mental faculty to form sensory ideas, we need to confront the objection that such a claim is inconsistent not only with Descartes’s views elsewhere, but also with other remarks in the Comments itself. Let us start with the charge of an inconsistency internal to the Comments. In response to Regius’s twelfth article, Descartes endorses the distinction in the Third Meditation of adventitious, factitious, and innate ideas (AT 8-2:358; cf. AT 7:57–58). The implication here seems to be that adventitious sensory ideas are distinct from innate ideas. But how, then, could Descartes say in the very next paragraph that sensory ideas are innate?44 We can easily dispel this tension by appealing to the suggestion in Descartes that sensory and intellectual ideas are innate in different ways. The production of innate sensory ideas follows immediately on the transmission of motions to the mind. In

44. This same problem applies to the claim, attributed to Descartes in the Conversation with Burman, that the author of the Comments “says not that all ideas are innate in him, but that some are also adventitious” (AT 5:165).

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contrast, Descartes indicates in the Comments that the formation of innate intellectual ideas, such as the idea of God, is much less tightly linked to the motions involved in sense experience. In particular, he claims there that the motion that gives rise to “verbal instruction or the observation of things” is a “remote and merely accidental cause” that “induces us to give some attention to the idea that we can have of God.” In this respect the motion is similar to the orders for certain work, which merely “give occasion to” the workers to produce the work as its “proximate and efficient cause” (AT 8-2:360). Not only are the orders remote in the sense of being temporally prior to the actual production of the work; they also are accidental in the sense that the workers might have produced the work without the orders. But motions are neither remote from nor accidental to the production of sensory ideas in this way. They are not remote, since the ideas are formed at the exact moment that the motions “approach” the mind, and they are not accidental, since, it seems, the presence of the motions is required to prompt the activity of the innate sensory faculty. The Comments thus includes the suggestion that though sensory ideas are innate in the sense that they derive from an innate mental faculty, still they are adventitious insofar as they possess a tight connection to bodily motions that is missing in the case of innate intellectual ideas.45 More recalcitrant, however, is the impression that the account of sensation in the Comments is in tension with the Sixth Meditation argument for the existence of the material world. Recall from a previous discussion the conclusion in the latter text that bodies possess an “active faculty” that is the cause of the objective reality of sensory ideas (see §2.1.1). Descartes also notes there that God would be a deceiver if these ideas “were emitted [emitterentur] by something other than corporeal things” (AT 7:80). The language here, as well as in other texts,46 seems to indicate that sensory ideas are not formed by an innate mental faculty, as in the Comments, but rather are “emitted” from the bodies that formally contain what they produce objectively in the ideas. It would not do here to dismiss the view in the Comments as aberrant, since Descartes offers a similar position elsewhere, most notably in a 1641 letter to Mersenne in which he wrote that all ideas “that involve no affirmation or negation are innate in us; for the sense organs do not bring [rapportent] us anything that is

45. Cf. the response to this problem of consistency in Schmaltz 1997, 40, which does not emphasize the point that occasioning causes are remote and accidental only in the case of innate intellectual ideas. Nadler takes Descartes to have held in the Comments that occasional causes in general are remote and accidental causes distinct from the proximate and efficient cause of their effects (Nadler 1994, 48). Although I suggested a similar position in Schmaltz 1992b, I now read the Comments as indicating that the motions that occasion sensory ideas are not merely remote and accidental. See §4.2.3 for further reservations concerning the account of occasional causation that Nadler attributes to Descartes. 46. See, for instance, the claim in the Principles that “whatever we sense undoubtedly comes [advenit] to us from something that is distinct from our mind” (PP II.1, AT 8-1:40), and the claim in the Passions that various perceptions, including sensations, are passions because “it is often not our soul that makes them such as they are, and the soul always receives [reçoit] them from things that are represented by them” (PP I.17, AT 11:342).

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such as the idea that arises in us [se reveille en nous] on their occasion, and thus this idea must have been in us previously” (22 July 1641, AT 3:418).47 So we do need to confront the apparent conflict between the accounts of the causation of sensation in the Sixth Meditation and the Comments. One way to lessen the conflict would be to emphasize that the discussion in the Sixth Meditation concerns the manner in which bodies external to us cause sensory ideas in us, whereas the Comments is concerned with the manner in which motions internal to our brain give rise to these ideas. The active faculty in bodies could produce sensory ideas in us by producing those motions in our brain that trigger the operation of our innate sensory faculty. In this sense, sensory ideas could still derive from the active faculty of an external body without arising solely from motions in the brain. Indeed, in the version of the proof of the existence of the material world in the French edition of the Principles, Descartes speaks of “the idea formed in us on the occasion of bodies from without” (l’idée se form en nous à l’occasion des corps de dehors) (PP II.1, AT 9-2:64). Yet he claimed in this same article that “everything we sense comes [vient] from something other than our thought” and that our sensation “depends on that thing that affects [touche] our senses” (AT 9-2:63).48 The indication here is that the claim that motions in the brain give occasion for the production of sensory ideas is consistent with the claim that such ideas come from external objects insofar as they depend on such objects for their production.49 Even so, the passage from the Comments does say that with the exception of judgments pertaining to experience, “there is nothing in our ideas that was not innate to the mind or the faculty of thinking” (AT 8-2:358; my emphasis). Given this claim, there seems to be no room for anything in the sensations to come from external bodies.50 I indicate presently that Descartes seems to have been most concerned here to deny that the mind literally sees anything in the brain. Yet it is also significant that he continued to claim in this text that brain motions “transmit something” to the mind that triggers the formation of sensory ideas by the innate mental faculty (AT 8-2:359). Even here, then, he wanted to allow that the body makes some sort of contribution to what is produced in the mind in sense experience.51

47. As I indicate presently, Descartes’s position in the Comments is related to the view in his earlier writings that the relation between motions and sensations can be understood in terms of the relation between signs and what they signify. 48. This additional claim supports Scott’s rejection of Garber’s tentative suggestion that the French edition of the Principles indicates a shift in Descartes’s thought away from the position that bodies cause sensations; cf. Garber 1993, 22, and Scott 2000, 508–10. 49. Cf. the defense of the consistency of the accounts of sensation in the Sixth Meditation and the Comments in Schmaltz 1997, 41–44. 50. Thanks to Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra for this objection. 51. For the point that Descartes allowed in the Comments for some sort of causal transmission from bodily motions to mind in sensory experience, see Scott 2000, 516–20. Scott is particularly concerned to counter Nadler’s account of “occasional causation” in Descartes. In contrast to the view I offer against Nadler in §4.2.3, however, Scott claims that transmission is to be contrasted with “efficacious or productive agency” and that it occurs at a “pre-efficiency” stage

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But what sort of contribution, exactly? My suggestion above, based on the remarks in the Sixth Meditation, was that bodies contribute the objective reality of the sensory ideas, that is, the bodily features the ideas represent insofar as these features are contained objectively in the mind (see §2.1.3 (i)). To be sure, Descartes does not refer in the Comments passage to the objective reality of sensory ideas. However, I take his strange talk in this text of brain motions “approaching” or being “transmitted to” the mind to reflect his earlier view that bodies send or emit the features that are contained objectively in our sensory ideas. Even if the ideas do not resemble the motions in our brain that external bodies cause, and even if there is nothing that is literally transferred into the mind from the motions, still these motions bring it about (albeit with the assistance of the activity of an innate mental faculty) that the mind has sensory ideas that direct it to certain bodily features rather than others. What the motions contribute, then, is the link between the ideas and the features of bodies that these ideas represent. Admittedly, the claim in the Comments that sensory ideas are formed by an innate mental faculty seems to add something to the more spare account of the causation of sensation in the Sixth Meditation. Indeed, I think that the Comments in fact reflects some sort of development in Descartes’s view of how bodily motions bring about sensory ideas.52 So the question I need to address is why Descartes is concerned in this text to distance himself from the view encouraged by some of his own remarks that bodies serve as the total efficient cause of sensory ideas. In addressing this question, Janet Broughton proposes that it was Descartes’s commitment to the containment axiom that led him away from the view that bodies serve as such causes. More than this, her view is that this axiom led him to the conclusion, which she finds in the Comments, that “the mind alone causes sensations.” Broughton reconstructs Descartes’s argument in this text as follows: [T]he formal containment principle [i.e., the containment axiom as it concerns cases where eminent containment is ruled out] applied to brain movements as the cause of sensation yields this requirement: Brain movements must contain exactly what is in the objects of sensation. Thus Descartes has shown in the [Comments] passage that a necessary condition for causation, as well as origination, has not been met. By showing that sensations do not originate from brain movements, Descartes has also shown that they are not caused by brain movements. . . . The formal containment principle plus the [Comments] argument entail a denial that brain movements cause sensations. (Broughton 1986, 118–19)53

“immediately prior to the actual production of ideas by the mind’” (Scott 2000, 520). For yet another interpretation of the Comments passage, on which Descartes held that the motions serve as causal triggers but do not produce the content of sensory ideas, see Rozemond 1999, 456–62. 52. See Wilson’s claim that her proposed reconciliations of Descartes’s various remarks on the causation of sensation “do not fully accommodate Descartes’s actual statements” and “do not at all resolve the problem about how the mind if truly ‘passive’ in sensation, can help to bring about sensory ideas” (Wilson 1999b, 52). In moving closer to this claim, I am here moving away from the more firmly “reconciliationist” position in Schmaltz 1997. 53. See the similar reading of the argument in the Comments in Secada 2000, 103–7, and Gorham 2002.

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There are two immediate questions that Broughton’s reconstruction of the argument raises: (1) Does Descartes’s containment axiom plus his argument in the Comments commit him to the denial that motions in the brain cause sensations?; and (2) is there even an implicit appeal in the Comments to the containment axiom? First question first. We can understand this question in terms of our discussion in §4.2.1 of the scholastic problem of the connection between phantasms and intelligible species. We have seen that though Thomas indicated that the phantasm can be a “secondary and instrumental” cause of the species, Suárez used occasionalist terminology in a manner that indicated that (apart from the divine concursus, of course) the agent intellect is the sole efficient cause of the species. What we need to ask is whether Descartes’s claim in the Comments that brain motions merely serve as the occasion for the formation of sensory ideas reveals that such motions are similar to Suárezian phantasms in lacking any sort of efficient causality, or whether such a claim allows for something akin to the derivative causality of Thomistic phantasms. I noted earlier the suggestion in Descartes that there can be efficient causes that are not total or adequate causes, and so are not fully subject to the containment axiom (see §2.1.2). In light of this suggestion, one could argue on Descartes’s behalf that though brain motions do not formally contain everything that comes about in the mind, they are still partial efficient causes of sensory ideas. Perhaps the total and efficient cause in this case is the combination of the motions and the innate mental faculty. An initial worry, however, is that Descartes’s account of the activity of the innate mental faculty conflicts with his containment axiom. In particular, the concern is that the mental faculty responsible for forming sensory ideas can contain neither formally nor eminently those features of sensory ideas not contained formally in brain motions. For Descartes indicates in the Comments that prior to their formation intellectual ideas exist merely potentially in the faculty that forms them (AT 8-2:361), and he presumably thinks that prior to their formation sensory ideas exist in the same way in the innate sensory faculty in the mind. So if formal containment requires the actual presence of what is formally contained, sensory ideas cannot be formally contained in the faculty that forms them. But on the account of eminent containment that I have attributed to Descartes (see §2.1.3 (ii)), they cannot be eminently contained in that faculty either, since they are not features of objects lower on the ontological scale than minds. One option would be for Descartes to allow for a weaker sort of formal containment than actual possession. Even if those features of sensory ideas that derive from the innate mental faculty are not actually present prior to their formation by the mind, the reality of those features could be contained in the reality of the innate mental faculty that forms them. It might seem that Descartes precludes this option when he insists in the Third Meditation that “the objective being of [an] idea can be produced not only by potential being [esse potentiali], which strictly speaking is nothing, but only by actual or formal [actuali sive formali]” (AT 7:47). Given the claim here, it may appear as if the reality of sensory ideas as present potentially in the innate mental faculty could not play a role in the causation of the ideas themselves.54

54. Thanks to Dan Kaufman for this objection.

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In this particular passage, however, what is “strictly speaking nothing” are divine perfections that cannot be contained in a finite mind. What worries Descartes is that there would be certain features of the reality contained in the idea of God that would have no foundation in the reality of its cause. But it does seem that the reality of the sensory ideas that the mind has a faculty to form does have a foundation in an actual being, namely, in that very faculty. If so, then the mind could be said to formally contain the reality of those features of its sensory ideas that do not derive from motions in the brain.55 The total and efficient cause of these ideas, consisting of motions in the brain and the innate mental faculty, could be said to formally contain all of the effect produced, and thus the containment axiom would be satisfied. One might well protest at this point that the innate mental faculty all by itself could be the total cause of sensory ideas, in just the way that Suárez’s agent intellect is said (in his commentary on De Amina, at least) to be the total (secondary) efficient cause of intelligible species. What reason would Descartes have to resist the position—in line with one of Suárez’s views of the role of phantasms in the production of intelligible species—that brain motions merely occasion rather than genuinely cause the formation of sensory ideas? One motivation for resistance emerges from the alternative in Suárez to a causal explanation of the link between the presence of the phantasm and the formation of the intelligible species. In De Anima, Suárez appealed to the fact that “the phantasm and the intellect of a human being are rooted in one and the same soul,” and thereby “have a wonderful ordering and harmony [mirum ordinem et consonantiam] in their operation” (DA IV.2, ¶12, Opera 3:719). Thus instead of invoking God as the direct cause of the harmony of operation, in a manner out of line with his anti-occasionalist sensibilities, Suárez held that the coordination of phantasm and intelligible species derives from the fact that the same soul is the efficient cause of both.56 An analogous explanation of the coordination of brain motions and sensory ideas is not open to Descartes. For unlike Suárez, he cannot say that it is the same soul that underlies the formation both of the motions and of the ideas. His dualism requires that he attribute the first two grades of sensation to radically different substances. To be sure, he does claim, in the passage from the Sixth Replies cited in §4.2.1, that sensations are a “result of ” the mind’s “being united with a bodily organ.” As indicated in §4.1.2, though, Descartes cannot take this union to involve the formation of a single substance that encompasses both the motions in this organ and the sensations in the mind. There remains the occasionalist option that God directly brings it about that the motions are coupled with the sensations. Significantly enough, however, there

55. In contrast, Suárez claimed that in all cases of immanent action, the cause that produces the effect is an equivocal one, and thus only eminently contains the effect; see MD XVIII.9, ¶10, 1:671. 56. Similarly, Suárez held that though a cognition of an object by means of external or internal senses cannot be an efficient cause of the act of appetite that constitutes the desire for that object, the “sympathy” between cognition and desire can be explained by the fact that the relevant faculties all are rooted in the same soul (DA III.9, ¶10, Opera 3:649*; V.3, ¶6, Opera 3:759*). I am indebted here to the discussion of Suárez’s position in Rozemond 1999, 441.

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is no appeal to God in the Comments.57 What Descartes claims there is rather that a mental faculty forms the ideas at the same time that certain motions “approach” the mind. One way of reading this claim, which is left open by his containment axiom, is that the approaching motions and the mental faculty work together as partial efficient causes of the same sensory effects. But is there even an implicit appeal to this axiom in the Comments? This was the second question we asked of Broughton’s analysis of the Comments. To answer this question, it is important to follow up on the reference in this text to the account of sensation Descartes “explicated at length in Dioptrics.” In this earlier text, appended to the 1637 Discourse, he argues that we do not perceive an object by viewing pictures of it in the brain, “as if there are other eyes in our brain with which we could perceive it” (AT 6:130). The concern here therefore is to argue that the mind does not come to have the perception by viewing pictures composed of motions in the brain. The argument in the Dioptrics is in fact linked not to considerations involving the containment axiom, but rather to an account of sensation in even earlier writings, in which Descartes invokes an analogy to signs. In The World, which he abandoned in 1633, Descartes responds to the claim that sensory ideas must be similar to “the objects from which they proceed” by noting that words need not be similar to what they signify. Now if words, which signify nothing except by human institution, suffice to make us conceive of things to which they bear no resemblance, then why could nature not also have established a certain sign which would make us have the sensation of light, even if this sign has nothing in itself similar to the sensation? Is it not thus that nature has instituted laughter and tears to make us read joy and sadness in the face of men? (W I, AT 11:4)

On the view presented here, bodily images that give rise to sensations are nonresembling signs, rather than perfect images, of external objects. Sensations are linked to the world by virtue of being linked to bodily signs of objects. In using the sign analogy, Descartes appears to suggest that the mind is aware of those bodily motions that are responsible for sensation. After all, the mind is aware of the laughter and tears by means of which it reads joy and sadness. More generally, signs seem to be able to function as signs in virtue of the fact that they are read or comprehended. Yet as I have mentioned, Descartes indicates in the Dioptrics that he does not wish to take the analogy this far when he ridicules the position that one is aware of something in the brain, “as if there were yet other eyes within our brain with which we could perceive [appercevoir] it.” To avoid this implausible position,

57. As admitted in Garber 1993, 23–24. However, Garber also sees Descartes as moving in his later writings away from the view in the Sixth Meditation that bodies are genuine causes of sensation and toward “something closer to what his occasionalist followers held, that God is the true cause of sensations on the occasion of certain motions in bodies” (24). For a detailed argument against this hypothesis in Garber that I take to be decisive, see Scott 2000, 504–15. See also note 48.

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he offers the alternative view that motions in the brain “are instituted by nature to make [the soul] to have such sensations” (AT 6:130).58 However, there is another aspect of the sign analogy that Descartes at least sometimes explicitly embraces. This analogy can be seen as implying that the mind is active in sensation. Just as the mind actively interprets written or spoken signs, so it responds actively to corporeal motions by forming sensations. Descartes indicates that mental activity is a consequence of the sign analogy when he states in The World that “it is our mind which represents to us the idea of light each time our eye is affected by the action which signifies it.” The fact that the mind is active is linked with the fact that bodily motions serve as signs. He continues this remark by claiming that because physical processes merely signify sensory ideas, the latter are “formed in our mind on the occasion of our being touched by external bodies” (W I, AT 11:4-6). This view, recorded in a relatively early work, is retained in the Comments, for in the latter the occasional connection between the presence of certain motions and the formation of sensory ideas, on the one hand, and the possession by mind of a productive faculty, on the other, are affirmed in the same sentence. What we have in the Comments, then, is not the recognition of restrictions that the containment axiom places on body-to-mind action, but rather the development of an account of sensation present in more primitive form in the Dioptrics and even earlier discussions of sensation. The concern throughout is to provide a replacement for the view that the mind senses objects by viewing resembling images of them in the brain. The alternative proposed is that what is present in the brain merely provides a sign to the mind to form nonresembling ideas of the objects in itself. Moreover, there is no indication that providing a sign is to be contrasted with causing the mind to form the ideas. In fact, Descartes speaks in The World of the mind as forming the idea of light when it is “affected by the action that signifies it” (AT 11:4), just as he speaks in the Dioptrics of the brain motions being instituted to produce sensations as “acting directly on the soul” (AT 6:130). This context of the argument in the Comments reveals that it is removed not only from considerations involving the containment axiom but also from the conclusion that bodily motions play no causal role in the formation of sensory ideas.

4.2.3. Occasional Causation and Psychophysical Laws On my interpretation, the final position in the Comments is that brain motions are real efficient causes of sensory ideas, albeit causes supplemented by the activity of the innate mental faculty. There is the argument, however, that Descartes takes these motions to be in a class of causes distinct from efficient causes. In particular, Steven Nadler finds in the Comments the position that by some means other than efficient causality, the motions “induce” the innate mental faculty to be the efficient cause of sensory ideas. More generally, his proposal is that Descartes takes there to

58. Even so, in this same text Descartes suggests the position that the mind sees something in the body when he claims that we sense the size of an object by comparing our knowledge of the distance to “the size of the images they imprint on the back of the eye” (AT 6:140).

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be a class of “occasional causes” that provide the occasion for something else to be the efficient cause of an effect. Nadler emphasizes that this sort of occasional causation is to be distinguished from occasionalism. Occasionalism is a species of occasional causation, on which all causes other than God are occasional causes that induce God to be an efficient cause of their effects. However, occasional causation does not require occasionalism. Indeed, on Nadler’s view Descartes endorses occasional causation in the Comments but also holds in this text that the innate mental faculty rather than God is the proximate efficient cause of our sensory ideas (Nadler 1994, 36–44).59 Nadler insists that though Descartes’s occasional causation is distinct from efficient causation, it “is still a real causal relation, albeit an inferior or secondary variety.”60 In contrast to the case of efficient causes, the relation of an occasional cause to its effect is “not grounded in some ontically real power” in that cause. However, this relation is “not just a Humean relationship of succession,” but involves genuine nomological correlations. In Descartes’s case, according to Nadler, the laws are grounded not in the nature of the occasional causes but in God’s will (Nadler 1994, 42–43). Nadler takes the suggestion in the Comments to be that motions in the brain are able to elicit the efficient causal activity of the innate mental faculty due to the fact that “God, in establishing the union of mind and body, has ordained that . . . particular motions in the body should occasion the mind to produce particular ideas” (Nadler 1994, 50). He cites in this connection Descartes’s claim in his early work, the Treatise on Man, that when God unites a rational soul to this machine . . . he will place its principal seat in the brain, and will make its nature such that the soul will have different sensations corresponding to the different ways in which the entrances to the pores in the internal surface of the brain are opened by means of the nerves. (AT 11:143–44)

Though God is invoked as an explanatory principle here, he is supposed to establish the occasional causal relation between body and mind not by means of his continual activity, as the occasionalist would have it, but “once and for all.” Nadler’s final judgment on Descartes’s account of occasional causation is: “Deus ex machina? Yes. Occasionalism? No” (Nadler 1994, 51). I have noted the admission in Descartes of formal causes and (perhaps, with respect to rational teleology) final causes distinct from the efficient causes governed by the containment axiom (§2.1.2 (ii)). Given Nadler’s view, we would need to add

59. Cf. the discussion of Descartes’s various uses of the term occasio in Specht 1966, 41–56, and 1972, 12–27. Along with Nadler (see Nadler 1994, 40 n. 13), Specht is critical of the claim in Henri Gouhier that Descartes did not in fact use this term in a philosophically rigorous manner (Gouhier 1926, 83–88). However, Specht differs from Nadler in taking Descartes to adopt the view in late scholasticism that occasional causes are efficient causes that are accidental, indirect, or assisting causes (see, e.g., Specht 1972, 19). 60. As Nadler notes, however, this claim causes problems for his view that occasionalism is a species of occasional causation, given that occasionalists have typically been concerned to deny that occasional causes have any sort of causal efficacy (Nadler 1994, 42, n. 16).

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occasional causes as another sort of nonefficient cause.61 However, I am not persuaded that Descartes takes occasional causes to produce effects by some means other than efficient causality. Nadler finds in Descartes’s account of body–body interaction the suggestion that in the case of efficient causation, “something literally passes from cause to effect, either because the cause gives up something to the effect or because it multiplies something of its own to share with the effect” (Nadler 1994, 38). But though Descartes does suggest at times what Broughton calls the “migration theory of motion,” I have argued that his more considered view is that a body serves as an efficient cause of motion not by transferring its own mode of motion, but rather by applying its force in a manner that results in the production of a numerically distinct mode of motion (see §3.2.1 (iii)). Thus, the fact that motion cannot literally transfer a sensory idea into the mind does not show that it cannot serve as an efficient cause of such an idea. Moreover, there is reason to doubt Nadler’s claim that the psychophysical laws that Descartes posited to explain the formation of sensory ideas are not grounded in the natures of the objects these laws relate. Indeed, in the passage from the Treatise on Man that Nadler cites, Descartes appeals to the fact that God made the nature of the human soul such that it has sensations corresponding to different states of the body to which it is united. To be sure, it is the nature of the soul that is mentioned here rather than the nature of the body that acts on it. However, the indication is that the nature of the soul is such that it is affected in particular ways by the action of body on it. Likewise, in a 1647 letter Descartes claims that motions can be connected to thoughts they do not resemble since our soul is of such a nature that it can be united to a body, it also has this property that each of its thoughts can be associated with certain motions or other dispositions of this body so that when the same dispositions recur in the body, they induce [induisent] the soul to have the same thought. (To Chanut, 1 Feb. 1647, AT 4:604)

This passage has been read (though not by Nadler) as a “foreshadowing of a Humean, constant conjunction, or regularity analysis of causation.”62 However, the reference to the fact that the mind has a “nature” that explains the connection of its thoughts to bodily motions and to the fact that these motions “induce” the thoughts in the mind indicates that Descartes was thinking of a causal relation grounded in the natures of the interacting entities. In particular, the human soul has a nature that explains how motions in the human body can cause it to have various sensations. In light of the

61. Cf. the view in Baker and Morris 1996 that Descartes took occasional causation to lack the sort of intelligible connection between causes and effects that is present in the case of efficient causation (see, for instance, 155–56). In suggesting that Descartes’s appeals to occasional causes lack the sort of rigor present in the case of causal explanations in his physics, Baker and Morris offer a view that is similar to the interpretation of Descartes in Loeb and Alanen that I consider presently. 62. This reading is found in Loeb 1981, 137. See the discussion below of Loeb’s more recent view of the mind–body relation in Descartes.

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remarks in the Comments, we can take Descartes’s position to be that the soul has an innate faculty that forms certain sensory ideas when certain motions in the body to which that soul is united act on it. Insofar as God connects motions and sensations by creating human souls and their bodies with particular natures that themselves carry the causal load, we have some reason to conclude, with respect to Descartes’s account of occasional causation: Deus ex machina? No. In fact, the account of body-to-mind action that I find in Descartes is similar in important respects to the “conservationist” account of body–body interaction that I have attributed to him (see §3.3). In particular, I have argued that he takes God’s “ordinary concursus” with such interaction to consist in his continued conservation of the matter in motion that, given certain initial conditions, itself determines subsequent changes in the distribution of motions. Likewise, the suggestion in the Comments is that God brings about body-to-mind action by creating the human mind with a faculty that itself responds to the action of certain bodily motions by forming particular sensory ideas. In the case neither of body–body interaction nor of bodyto-mind action does God bring about the relevant connections by directly producing the corresponding states or by instituting the governing laws by means of a separate “law volition.” Rather, in both cases he simply creates and conserves objects with natures that themselves determine the laws that are followed. It is true that Descartes does not emphasize that the laws connecting motions to sensations derive from God’s immutability, as he did in the case of the laws governing body–body interaction. But there is one intriguing passage that appeals to divine constancy in the case of body-to-mind action. In the Conversation with Burman, Descartes is reported to have responded to the question of why God allows for sensory deception by claiming that God fabricated our body as a machine, and willed that it act as a universal instrument, which always operates in the same manner according to its laws. And thus when it is well disposed, it gives [dat] to the soul a correct thought; when poorly [disposed], it nonetheless still affects [afficit] the soul according to its laws, so that there must result a thought by which it is deceived; for if the body did not supply [the deceptive thought], it would not act uniformly [aequaliter] and according to its universal laws, [and] there would be a defect in God’s constancy, since he would not be permitting [the body] to act uniformly, when there are uniform laws and modes of acting. (AT 5:163–64)

I am reluctant to stake too much on this passage, since it is not from Descartes’s own hand. However, the claim here that God makes the human body such that it “affects” the soul in accord with its universal laws complements Descartes’s view elsewhere that God makes the nature of the soul such that motions in its body regularly induce it to have certain sensory thoughts. Divine constancy would seem to ensure that human souls and their bodies retain their same natures, and thus that they continue to follow the laws that those natures determine. In contrast to Nadler’s claim that Descartes takes the occasional causation involved in mind-to-body action to derive from laws that are not grounded in ontically real powers in objects, I find in the texts the suggestion that these laws have a foundation in the natures that God creates and conserves. The depth of my interpre-

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tive dispute with Nadler is indicated by his remark in a note that the ontological status of the power of an occasional cause can be compared to the ontological status of force in Descartes’s physics: force is nothing really (i.e., ontically) in bodies . . . , but rather is simply the conformity of bodies in motion and at rest to certain laws of nature due to the way they are moved by God (whose will is, in a sense, the real locus of force). Likewise, A’s “power” to occasion e is simply the lawlike correlation between A and e, as established by God. (Nadler 1994, 43, n.18)

Now I agree with Nadler that the powers of occasional causes can be compared to the ontological status of force in Descartes’s physics. But whereas Nadler attributes to Descartes the view that these powers, like the forces, are nothing real in objects but are due solely to divinely imposed laws, I take him to offer the position that the powers, like the forces, derive from natures in objects that reflect the relevant laws. It is true that in contrast to the case of body–body interaction, Descartes holds that motions are merely occasional causes of sensory ideas. But this is not because bodies cannot be real efficient causes of ideas. Rather, whereas bodily forces can be total causes of changes in motions, such forces can bring about the formation of sensory ideas only due to the distinctive nature of the mind on which they act. Without the presence of an innate mental faculty that is sensitive to these forces, the motions would not be able to act on the mind at all. Insofar as this faculty pertains particularly to the union, this account of the manner in which motions serve as occasional causes is in line with Descartes’s remark to Elisabeth that it is only by means of the primitive notion of the union that we can conceive “the force . . . of the body to act on the soul, in causing its sensations and passions” (21 May 1643, AT 3:665). In taking the remarks to Elisabeth to indicate that there is an ontological ground for psychophysical laws, I deviate not only from Nadler but also from commentators who find in Descartes the position that these laws are “brute” facts that, in contrast to laws governing motion, are incapable of yielding true scientific explanation. For instance, Louis Loeb claims that “in Descartes’s view, the mind–body union consists in a set of connections between specific types of brain states and specific types of thoughts . . . that are not themselves subsumed under more general connections from which they can be derived” (Loeb 2005, 70). He notes the similarity of this claim to the conclusion in the work of Lilli Alanen that there is in Descartes “no room . . . for a scientific . . . psychology accounting for the laws of our mental life as embodied, human persons” (Alanen 1996, 6).63 Is it so clear, however, that Descartes has no room for a scientific psychology? After all, in a famous passage from the preface to the French edition of the Principles,

63. Cited in Loeb 2005, 85, n.70. Alanen develops her position further in Alanen 2003. See also the conclusion in Della Rocca forthcoming that the causes involved in mind–body interaction do not render their effects intelligible. But cf. Hatfield’s thesis, closer to my own view, that “Descartes included (at least some functions and states of) mind as part of nature, [and] despite his dualism he continued an established tradition of treating the operations of the senses as open to empirical investigation” (Hatfield 2000, 631).

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he claims that the “tree of philosophy” that has metaphysics as its roots and physics as its trunk yields as branches the three “principal sciences” of medicine, mechanics, and morals. Moral science in particular is presented as the most important of these sciences, “which presupposes a complete knowledge [connoissance] of the other sciences and is the ultimate level of Wisdom” (AT 9-2:14). This highest science of morals seems to depend on the systematic classification Descartes later offers in the Passions of the perceptions of the human soul that derive from certain motions in the body to which it is united. In this same text, he insists that the soul has a “nature” such that “it receives as many different impressions, that is, it has as many different impressions as there occur different motions” in the pineal gland (PS I.34, AT 11:354). It seems that the psychophysical laws that Descartes invokes are not brute or unsubsumed, but rather are to be explained in terms of the special nature of the human soul. We know from the Comments that this nature consists in part in the presence of an innate mental faculty for forming sensory ideas.64 There is admittedly the troubling appeal to ends in Descartes’s account of the union. Here we would seem to have an important difference from his nonteleological physics.65 Even so, an appeal to ends need not preclude an investigation of the various efficient causes responsible for the fact that human beings have the various states that serve the natural end of the preservation of the union. In particular, the ends could be “hardwired” into the innate mental faculty responsible for the formation of sensory ideas. The nature of this faculty could be such that it forms just those sensory ideas that serve this end when the appropriate motions in the brain act on the human soul.66 Even given this view, both the motions and the faculty remain efficient causes that jointly explain the presence of the sensory connections governed by psychophysical laws. For Descartes, of course, God must be in the background here, for it is he who must create and conserve human souls and their bodies with the natures that make such connections possible. Even so, it is important to emphasize that he took God to be in the background, and that he related psychophysical laws most immediately to the conserved natures.

64. Loeb objects to the related proposal in Rozemond that Descartes can explain sensation in terms of innate causal capacities in the mind on the grounds that investing “the mind with a plethora of fine-grained causal capacities does not secure an explanation of the specific connections in terms of the mind’s essence” (Loeb 2005, 85, n.64, citing Rozemond 1999, 455–56, 464–65). But even if there is no explanation here in terms of mind’s essence as a purely intellectual substance, there does seem to be an explanation in terms of the innate mental faculty responsible for the formation of sensory ideas. 65. See Loeb’s claim that Descartes’s appeals to teleology in his explanation of the union reveal that he exempted “his account of the mind and its relationship to the body not only from mechanism, but also from the sorts of explanatory requirements he himself regards as proper to physical science.” Just prior to making this claim, however, Loeb admits that this feature of Descartes’s thought conflicts with the fact that he “aspired to a scientific treatment of a wide range of broadly ‘mental’ phenomena” (Loeb 2005, 79). 66. Cf. the argument in Simmons 2001 that Descartes’s appeal to the ends of the union is consistent with his restriction of causal explanations of the states of the human being to efficient causes.

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4.3. MIND-TO-BODY ACTION Just as we have had to overcome a fixation on the heterogeneity problem to understand Descartes’s struggles with body-to-mind action, so we will need to look beyond this problem to discern the issues he was concerned to address with respect to action in the other direction, namely, mind-to-body action. Our consideration of Descartes’s account of body-to-mind action started with a scholastic problem concerning interaction that pertains exclusively to this sort of action. The treatment here of his account of mind-to-body action will start with a different scholastic problem concerning interaction that derives from the Aristotelian prohibition of action at a distance. For many scholastics, this prohibition precluded the possibility of any action of spirits on bodies that does not involve their spatial “presence” to those bodies. This scholastic position provides the proper context for Descartes’s two main attempts to defend his position that an immaterial substance can act on an extended thing. The first involves his claim in the Sixth Replies and the 1643 correspondence with Elisabeth, among other places, that we can understand this action in terms of the action of the scholastic quality of weight or heaviness. The second involves the claim in the Elisabeth correspondence as well as in his later correspondence with More that we can understand an immaterial substance that acts on a body to have a special sort of extension, which he calls in the More correspondence an “extension of power.” In both cases, I take the claims to indicate—in line with a traditional scholastic view— that minds are indeed spatially present to the bodies on which they act. However, Descartes’s discussion of mind-to-body action broaches issues that go beyond not only the heterogeneity problem, but also scholastic accounts of the action of spirits on bodies. One notable example is the issue—which Leibniz popularized— of the compatibility of the action of mind on body with the principles of Descartes’s physics, and in particular with his principle of the conservation of total quantity of motion in the material world. Here I enter a debate in the literature over Leibniz’s view that Descartes was led by the constraints of his conservation principle to limit the action of mind on body to changing the direction of motion. In the end I side with the conclusion of critics of this view that Descartes in fact never endorsed the “change of direction” account of such action, but also with the conclusion of Leibniz’s defenders that the constraints of Descartes’s physics provide good reason for him to endorse it.

4.3.1. Scholastic Spiritual Presence Descartes of course was not the first to claim that the mind is immaterial, and so to broach the problem of how the mind can act on something that is material. The doctrine of the immateriality of the intellect goes back at least to Plato, and was standardly accepted by the scholastics. Thus, Aquinas insisted that purely spiritual substances, and even the rational souls that serve as the form of human composites, are incorporeal entities that can or do exist apart from body.67 However, the principles

67. See, for instance, his argument in ST I.75.2 for the conclusion that the human soul is something that can subsist by itself apart from body, and thus is an incorporeal substance.

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underlying his account of the action of the immaterial on the material emerge most clearly in his discussion not of the action of finite spirits on body, but rather of God’s “presence” in the material world. Aquinas argued that God must be present in every place in this world by appealing to the axiom in Aristotle that “no action of an agent, however powerful it may be, acts at a distance, except through a medium.”68 Given his conclusion that every being and every action depends immediately on God’s action (see §1.1.2), it follows from the “no distant action” axiom that nothing is distant from him, “as if it could be without God in itself ” (ST I.8.1, ad 3). It may seem that in attributing ubiquitous material presence to God, Thomas also attributed to him extension, and thus divisibility. Yet he attempted to avoid the heterodox implication of divine divisibility by holding that God does not inhabit places in the way in which bodies do. To illustrate the special sense of spiritual presence involved in the case of God, Thomas turned to the case of the presence of the rational soul in the human body. As a “perfect form,” this soul is so present “whole in whole and whole in each part” (tota in toto et tota in singulis partibus).69 Since it does not have parts spread out in the parts of the body, the soul remains indivisible even while being present throughout the body. Likewise, according to Thomas, God is “wholly in all things and in each one” (ST I.8.2, ad 3). In this very same text, however, Aquinas explained the distinctive nature of God’s spiritual presence by appealing to something other than the manner in which the rational soul serves as the form of the human body. In particular, he appealed to the fact that incorporeal beings are present where they act “not by contact of dimensive quantity, as bodies are, but by contact of power” (ST I.8.2, ad 1). This notion of presence by “contact of power” is prominent also in the question of the Summa Theologiae devoted to the relation of angels as purely spiritual substances to place. There it is said that an angel is “in a corporeal place by application of the angelic power in any manner whatever to any place” (ST I.52.1). Admittedly, Aquinas went on to compare this sort of presence to the presence of the rational soul in a human body, noting, for instance, that an incorporeal substance that is in a place by contact of power contains but is not contained by a place, as “the soul is in the body as containing it, not as contained by it” (ST I.52.1). It thus may appear that the difference between the presence of the human soul in its body and the presence of an angel by contact of power is not significant after all. However, some sort of distinction is required by his admission that both a human soul and an angel can be co-present in a body. To see why this admission requires such a distinction, we need to consider Aquinas’s argument that two angels cannot exist in the same place at the same time. This argument begins with the premise that an angel can be present in a place only

68. In ST I.8.1, Thomas cited Aristotle’s discussion in Physics VII as the source for this axiom. 69. The contrast here is with imperfect forms, such as those plants and lower animals, or bruta, which have parts that are distributed in the parts of the body to which it is united that can exist apart from the whole (as in cases of plant cutting or the division of a worm). On later scholastic accounts of divisible souls, see Des Chene 2000a, ch. 9.

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if it perfectly contains it, and it can so contain such a place only if it is a total cause of what occurs at that place. But Aquinas rejected the possibility of the sort of causal overdetermination that occurs when an effect has two different total causes of the same order.70 Thus his conclusion is that there can be only one angel present in a place at a time. However, he noted as a possible counterexample to this conclusion the—admittedly quaint—case of demonic possession. The problem in this case is that we seem to have the co-presence of two spiritual entities—namely, the demon and the possessed soul—in the same body at the same time. However, Aquinas responded that the demon and the soul do not have “the same relation of causality” to the body insofar as the soul serves as the substantial form of the body whereas the demon does not (ST I.52.3, ad 3).71 Though the demon and the possessed soul are co-present in the body, then, they are present there by means of different sorts of causality, and thus there is no instance here of causal overdetermination.72 Despite this admission of different ways in which incorporeal entities can be causally related to bodies, it continues to be the case for Thomas, given his understanding of the Aristotelian no-distant-action axiom, that any sort of action of such entities on body requires that they be spatially present where they act. However, this requirement on spiritual action was not universally accepted. A generation after Thomas, for instance, John Duns Scotus (†1308) insisted that it is essential to divine omnipotence that God can produce effects without being present where he acts.73 Moreover, Thomas’s critic Durandus argued around the same time, in his Sentences, that even finite angels act through their intellect and will alone, and thus need not be present in a place in order to act there (S I.37.1, 1:101–2*).74 To be sure, Durandus’s claim that the angel is present “by operation” (per operationem) or “the application of power to a place” (applicationem virtute ad locum) (S I.37.1, ¶39, 1:102*) may not seem to be far from Thomas’s view of angelic presence via a “contact of power.” Nevertheless, Durandus explicitly rejected the application of the Aristotelian no-distant-action axiom to the case of angelic action on body, arguing that in this case it is only the effect, and not the intellectual power responsible for the effect, that must have a spatial location.75

70. The qualification “of the same order” is needed, of course, to allow for Thomas’s “causal compatibilist” position that both God and creatures can be total causes of the same effect given that creatures belong to a causal order that is subordinated to divine action (see §1.1.2). 71. This response draws on the position in ST I.51.3 that angels cannot exercise the vital functions of a body, since they are not united to a body. 72. Perhaps the view here is that the demon is the total cause of the soul’s being the total cause of certain bodily actions. 73. For discussion of Scotus’s position with references, see Sylwanowicz 1996, 174–81. 74. This quaestio is a commentary on ST I.52.1. Durandus also insisted, in response to Thomas’s views in ST I.8.2, that God is in all places “not in himself, but according to his effects” (S I.37.1, ¶6, 1:100*). In line with his “mere conservationist” position, Durandus held that the action by which God is present in all places is his conservation of the existence of all material beings. 75. So also, Durandus argued contrary to Thomas’s view in ST I.53.1 that since angels cannot occupy a place, they cannot be said to move locally, that is, from one place to another (S I.37.2, 1:102–3*).

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In his Disputations, Suárez defended the need for spiritual presence in the case of angelic action on body against the objection in Durandus that in such a case what is required is not the proximity of position but an immediacy of intellectual power (cited in MD XVIII.8, ¶7, 1:652). Suárez insisted that an angel must have “a substantival and real delimited presence in accord with which it must be conjoined to a patient when it acts on that patient,” and that such a presence is “perhaps what St. Thomas meant by ‘spiritual contact with a body’” (MD XVIII.8, ¶42, 1:666).76 In response to Durandus, Suárez noted that since the angel can will any object indifferently but cannot move just any object, its power to move must be distinct from its will. The efficacy of this power requires that the angel be present to the body to move it (¶43, 1:666–67; cf. MD XXXV.6, ¶¶22–23, 2:474–75*). To explain the nature of the “substantival and real delimited presence” required here, Suárez appealed to our experience of “the rational soul that is diffused through the whole body and necessarily is as whole is in whole and whole is in each part” (MD XXX.7, ¶44, 2:109*). As in the case of Aquinas, the point of the comparison to the soul’s union with body is to show that what is present in a divisible body need not itself be divisible. Even so, Suárez allowed that the substantival presence of an angel in a body differs in important ways from the presence of the rational soul in its body. Whereas the soul can be united only to a body specially suited to it, for instance, the angel is not limited to a particular sort of body (MD XXXV.6, ¶23, 2:475*).77 On the other side is the fact that the rational soul, as the substantial form of a body, can be the source of vital actions of that body. Since the angel is not a substantial form, it cannot produce such actions, but can bring about in a body only local motion (¶¶15–16, 2:472–73*). This last difference indicates an interesting point of contact between Aquinas and Suárez. Aquinas had argued that though an angel is more perfect than a body, still it cannot cause those actions of the body that derive from its form, since it is not sufficiently similar to a substantial form (ST I.110.2).78 Suárez attempted to reinforce this line of argument by appealing to the fact that “a given thing’s being more perfect is not sufficient for its being able to effect a less perfect thing.” What is required further is that the cause be “proportioned to the type of action in question.” Since angels are not proportioned to the actions of substantial forms, however, they cannot produce such actions (MD XVIII.1, ¶17, 1:598). Suárez linked this inability to the fact that angels “do not contain corporeal things eminently.” I have noted that Descartes’s account of eminent containment is more restrictive than Suárez’s insofar as the former has the implication missing in the latter that only minds can eminently contain objects (see §2.1.3 (ii)). But now we can discern a sense in which Suárez’s account is more restrictive than Descartes’s. For we discovered earlier the implica-

76. Suárez noted, however, that the claim that a spiritual entity must have such a presence does not itself commit one to a view on whether the operation constitutes the nature of this presence or whether (as Suárez himself held) the presence is prior to and independent of that operation (MD XVIII.8, ¶42, 1:666). 77. For the similar position in Thomas, see ST I.110.3, ad 3. 78. Cf. note 71.

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tion in Descartes that a finite mind can eminently contain the entire visible world even though it cannot produce such a world. Missing in Descartes, then, is Suárez’s requirement that what eminently contains an object must be proportioned to the production of that object. Given his rejection of the claim that angels can eminently contain bodies, however, Suárez might seem to be committed to the conclusion that they cannot produce local motion in bodies either. Yet he argued that since local motion is not bound up with the form of a body, it is something to which an angel can be proportioned (MD XXXV.6, ¶16, 2:478*). Here he was drawing on the claim in Thomas that angels are capable of producing local motion, since such motion is “perfect” in the Aristotelian sense of not requiring any intrinsic change in the moving object (ST I.110.3).79 Since Descartes holds that all change in body is due to the local motion of its parts (see, e.g., PP II.23, AT 8-1:52–53), he need not take the result in Aquinas and Suárez that angels are limited to local motion to indicate any significant restriction on angelic action. Moreover, he is quite willing to admit that angels can act on body, as when he claims in his 1649 letter to More that “an angel can exercise power now on a greater and now on a lesser part of corporeal substance” (15 Apr. 1649, AT 5:342). However, his further claim in this letter that angels and other incorporeal substances have “no extension of substance [extensio substantiæ], but only an extension of power [extensio potentiæ]” (5:342) raises the question of whether he could accept the claim in Aquinas and Suárez that there can be no spiritual action on a body without the presence of that spirit to the body it moves. In other words, does Descartes’s “extension of power” involve something as thick as Suárez’s “substantival and real delimited presence,” or rather only something as thin as Durandus’s “application of power to a place”? With respect to this question, it turns out to be relevant that when Elisabeth challenged Descartes to explain how an immaterial substance could affect an extended thing, he appeals to the scholastic conception of the manner in which the real quality of weight or heaviness acts on body.

4.3.2. The Heaviness Analogy and the Extension of Power Elisabeth’s initial objection to Descartes regarding the conceivability of mind–body interaction was that it is not conceivable that an immaterial mind could “determine the motion” of a body given that it is not literally in contact with that body (see §4.1.1). To show how he conceived of the interaction in this case, Descartes responds by appealing to the scholastic account of heaviness in terms of the real quality of weight (pesanteur). On that account, this quality consists simply in “the force to move the body in which it is toward the center of the earth,” and even though the quality is supposed to be a being distinct from body, “we have no difficulty in conceiving how it moves this body or how it is joined to it; and we never think that [motion] is made by a real contact between two surfaces, because we experience in ourselves that we have a particular notion to conceive it.” This notion is simply that

79. In this text Thomas cited Aristotle’s claim in Physics VIII.7 (261a14, Aristotle 1984, 1:436) that local motion requires no change in the quality or quantity of the object moved.

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of the union, or more particularly of the force of the soul to move the body. Descartes emphasizes that we misuse this notion when we use it to conceive of the action of the scholastic quality of weight, since this quality “is nothing really distinct from body, as I hope to show in my Physics” (21 May 1643, AT 3:667–8). Even so, the point of the analogy is to draw Elisabeth’s attention to the fact that the notion provides a manner of conceiving of the action of the soul on body, despite the fact that it is something that is really distinct from body. In his letter to Elisabeth, Descartes refers back to his discussion in the Sixth Replies of the action of heaviness (gravitatem) (AT 3:666).80 He observes in that text that he had in his youth conceived of heaviness as a quality insofar as “I referred it to the bodies in which it inhered,” but also as real insofar as “I really took it to be a substance: in the same way that clothing, considered in itself, is a substance, although when it is referred to a clothed man, it is a quality.” He had further conceived of heaviness as something which, though it is “spread out through the whole body that is heavy,” nonetheless does not possess the same kind of extension that body possesses, since “the true extension of body is such that it excludes the penetration of all parts,” whereas heaviness is something “extended throughout the heavy body.” The co-extension of this quality is also tied to the fact that “it could exercise all of its power [vim] in any part of [the heavy body],” as when that body pulls on a rope attached to one of its parts “just as if this heaviness were only in the part touching the rope instead of also being spread through the other parts.” This conception of the power of heaviness is supposed to be akin to the conception of the soul as related to the body in which it is united as “whole in whole, and whole in each of its parts” (AT 7:441–42). However, this comparison seems to be weakened by the fact that the co-extension of the human soul does not include the ability of that soul to exercise its power in any part of its body. As I have indicated, Descartes makes clear that the human soul can bring about voluntary motion only by acting on the pineal gland (see §4.1.3). To be sure, he allows in the Passions that this soul is related to the whole body given that this body is “in a sense indivisible because of the arrangement of its organs, these being so related to one another that the removal of any one of them renders the whole body defective” (PS I.30, AT 11:351). Insofar as the soul is joined to a body that is indivisible in this way, it can be said to be “whole in whole, and whole in each part.” Nevertheless, this relation of the soul to the whole extension of the body does not involve the power of the soul to act directly on any part of that extension. In this respect, then, the coextension of the soul must be distinguished from the co-extension of heaviness.81 I have drawn attention to the confusion in Descartes of the conception of mind as being able to act on body with the conception of the human soul as united with a particular body (see §4.1.1). In his discussion of the heaviness analogy, we have the related confusion of the extension that the mind must have to act on body with

80. See also the references to this discussion in To Hyperaspistes, Aug. 1641, AT 3:424–25; and To Arnauld, 29 July 1648, AT 5:222–23. 81. Cf. the criticism of Descartes’s use of the heaviness analogy in Rozemond 2005, which has influenced my discussion here.

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the extension that the soul has in virtue of its union with body. To act on a body, mind must have a power that is somehow present to that body. But the union with a body presupposes the different condition that this body consist of parts that are systematically interrelated in a particular manner. Nevertheless, there is one point of contact between the cases of mind-to-body action and soul-body union that may help to explain why Descartes confuses them. Both this action and the union require that the mind or soul have a location, and so not be something that lacks any sort of extension. Even though Descartes held in his youth that the quality of heaviness is really distinct from body, still he was able to conceive of it as being located in the parts of the body where it can act. And he was able to conceive of heaviness in this way because he already had the notion of his soul as an immaterial thing that is nonetheless present in the body to which it is united. Though Descartes is not careful to note that the sort of presence involved in heaviness differs from the sort of presence involved in the union, this need not undermine the basic point that the immateriality of the soul does not preclude its contact with a body. And this point is all that he needs to address Elisabeth’s original worry that the touch required to determine the motion of body is incompatible with the immateriality of mind. Descartes does not simply drop the claim in his correspondence with Elisabeth that the soul can be conceived to have some kind of extension. Indeed, this claim plays a central role in his late correspondence with Henry More.82 More took exception to Descartes’s doctrine that the nature of body consists in extension on the grounds that “God, and an angel, truly any other thing subsisting per se, is a res extensa” (11 Dec. 1648, AT 5:238*). For More, anything that exists must be somewhere, and so must have an extension. Whatever lacks extension can only be nowhere, and thus be nothing. This explains why More later charged that those who follow Descartes in taking minds to lack extension are “Nullibists,” literally, nowherists.83 To be sure, Descartes does deny in his initial response to More that “real extension [veram extensionem], as commonly conceived by everyone, is found either in God, or in angels, or in our mind, or in any substance that is not a body.” The fact that such substances do not have real extension is revealed by the fact that “if there were no body, I would understand no space with which angels or God would be coextended.” Nevertheless, Descartes also insists in this response that immaterial substances can have “capacities or powers” (virtutes aut vires) that “apply themselves to extended things” (5 Feb. 1649, AT 5:269–70). In a previously cited passage from a subsequent letter to More, he expresses this point by saying that even though minds do not have “an extension of substance,” nonetheless they do have an “extension of power,” as shown by the fact that “an angel can exercise its power now in a greater, now in a lesser part of corporeal substance” (15 Apr. 1649, AT 5:342). This response did not placate More. He protested that it implies “a contradiction that a power of the mind is extended, when the mind itself is in no way extended.”

82. For a comprehensive survey of More’s attitude toward Cartesianism, see Gabbey 1982. See also the more recent discussion in Jesseph 2005 of More’s contribution to the reception of Descartes in England. 83. See the discussion in More’s 1671 Enchiridion Metaphysicum (More 1995, 27.2).

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More was particularly concerned to argue that we could not distinguish between extension of power and extension of substance in God’s case given the doctrine of absolute divine simplicity. But he also made the point that even in the case of finite minds, there cannot be a distinction between the two kinds of extension given that the power that is extended is merely “an intrinsic mode of the mind, it is not outside of the mind itself” (23 July 1649, AT 5:379*). Since a mode is merely the manner in which a substance exists, the mode cannot have any extension if the substance it modifies lacks extension. Descartes ultimately concedes that any distinction of God’s substance from his power is problematic. He is led thereby to the Thomistic view of God’s ubiquity, holding that “God’s essence must be present everywhere for his power to be able to manifest itself everywhere.” But there is no indication that Descartes is willing to give up his earlier claim that extension is not essential to God insofar as God could exist in the absence of any body. One has the sense here that he is simply having difficulty expressing this point in a manner consistent with the doctrine of divine simplicity.84 Nevertheless, in the case of finite minds, there is no similar barrier to his assertion that it is not essential to an immaterial thing that it have a relation to extension. In this sense, Descartes is indeed a “nowherist.” Even so, this sort of nowherism admits only the possibility that minds exist in a world without bodies, and thus without any extension. There remains the question of whether Descartes is a nowherist with respect to minds that act on bodies in the actual world. To address this question, we need to consider further the sort of “extension of power” that he attributed to minds. The discussion in §4.3.1 of the scholastic debate over spiritual presence is in fact germane to such a consideration. We have seen that Thomas was led by his acceptance of the Aristotelian no-distant-action axiom to the conclusion that there must be a “contact of power” in the case of the actions of spirits on bodies. In Suárez, this contact of power required in turn a “substantival and real delimited presence” of the spirit to the body. If Descartes’s extension of power were equivalent to Thomas’s contact of power, particularly as Suárez interpreted it, then he would be committed to the conclusion that this extension requires that minds that act on bodies are really located where those bodies are. However, there is also the possibility that the Cartesian extension of power is just a version of Durandus’s “application of power to a place,” which requires the location only of the effects of the action of a spirit on body, and not of the spirit itself. If Descartes embraced Durandus’s alternative conception of spiritual presence, he could have responded to More’s main objection by simply denying that the mental power to act on body, as opposed to the effects of this power, has a location. It is perhaps significant that Descartes does not respond to More in this manner, but simply insists that minds lack any essential relation to extension. Even more significant, though, is his persistent suggestion that the scholastic conception of the relation of heaviness or weight to the body in which it inheres is modeled on the conception of the relation of our soul to the body with which it is united. For surely Descartes does not take

84. See Descartes’s earlier claim to More that he prefers to discuss the nature of extension with respect to finite minds, “which are more on the scale of our own perception, rather than to argue about God” (15 Apr. 1649, AT 5:343).

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the scholastics to hold that the quality of heaviness lacks any location. Indeed, the indication in the Sixth Replies is that this quality is in fact located throughout the heavy body. Given that our idea of the soul provides the model for this conception of heaviness, it would seem that this idea presents the soul as something that also is located in the body with which it is united. Contrary to the view in Durandus, then, it is not just the effects of our soul that are present in our body, but our soul itself.85 Of course, we must keep in mind Descartes’s warning in his correspondence with More, as well as in his correspondence with Elisabeth, that immaterial things are not present in the material world with the same sort of extension that bodies possess. Whereas the extension of bodies entails impenetrability, and thus an exclusion of all other bodily extension, such is not the case with the extension of minds (cf. To More, Aug. 1649, AT 5:403, and To Elisabeth, 28 June 1643, AT 3:694–95).86 Yet what may seem strange, on a contemporary understanding of Descartes’s dualism, is the fact that he attributed any sort of extension to mind. In light of scholastic discussions of spiritual presence to bodies, however, this attribution is not only not unusual, but also understandable as a means of avoiding action at a distance, or at least action without proximity, in the case of mind-to-body action.87

4.3.3. Voluntary Motion and the Conservation Principle In chapter 3, I noted the doctrine in Descartes—central to his physics—that God’s ordinary concursus does not bring about any change in the total quantity of motion or motive force that he originally created in matter. One natural question is how

85. As indicated in Reid 2008, later Cartesians such as Geraud de Cordemoy (1626–84) and Johann Clauberg (1622–65) insisted that finite spirits are present in a place merely “operationally” and not substantially. 86. More would agree that the extension that the mind has differs from the divisible and impenetrable extension that is found in bodies. However, after Descartes’s death he came to reject the scholastic view, which Descartes himself endorsed, that the soul is present in the body as “whole in whole and whole in each part.” More came to hold that such a view, which in his Enchiridion Metaphysicum he labels “Holenmerism” (see More 1995, 98), must be replaced by the position that the extension of the soul, like the extension of space, has distinct but “indiscerpible” (i.e., indivisible) parts. For further discussion of the evolution in More’s views on these issues, see Reid 2007. 87. But cf. the view in Reid 2008 that though Descartes in the end was forced to concede that God’s activity in the material world requires his substantial spatial presence, on balance the evidence favors the view that he took the action of finite minds on bodies to require only an “operational” presence. For the reasons indicated in the text, I take Descartes’s use of the heaviness analogy and his appeal to an “extension of power” to indicate more than an operational presence. Moreover, whereas Reid sees Descartes’s claim in the More correspondence that finite minds are not present in a place “in virtue of essence” (15 Apr. 1649, AT 5:343) as supporting the conclusion that they are present merely operationally, I read it as saying only that having a location is not essential to such minds, since they could continue to exist even though there are no bodies. Nevertheless, I concede that Descartes himself was not careful to close off an operationalist view of spiritual presence.

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Descartes’s admission of mind-to-body action can be reconciled with his principle of the conservation of motion. In contrast to other aspects of his account of this action, his views on this issue have no clear scholastic precedent, since this principle has no analogue in the scholastics and in fact was singled out for condemnation by the Jesuits (see §3.1.2 (ii)). In attempting to relate Descartes’s views of causation in psychology to his views of causation in physics, then, we must strike out on a new path. One place to start is with Leibniz’s various comments regarding Descartes’s view of the manner in which the soul moves the body. In correspondence with Arnauld, Leibniz discusses the position, which “M. Descartes apparently intends,” that the soul, or God on its occasion, changes only the direction or determination of the motion and not the force that is in bodies, because it does not appear probable that God is constantly transgressing, on the occasion of every act of will by minds, the general law of nature that the same amount of force must continue to exist. (30 Apr. 1687, Leibniz 1978, 2:94/Leibniz 1985a, 117)

In the New Essays concerning Human Understanding, which he finished by 1704, Leibniz attributes to “the Cartesians” the position that “immaterial substances at least change the direction or determination, if not the force, of bodies” (I.1, Leibniz 1978, 6:72/Leibniz 1981, 72). However, in other mature writings, he is not reluctant to attribute this position to Descartes himself. Thus, Leibniz writes in the 1710 Theodicy that Descartes wished . . . to make a part of the body’s action dependent on the soul. He believed in the existence of a rule of Nature to the effect, according to him, that the same quantity of motion is conserved in bodies. He deemed it not possible that the influence of the soul should violate this law of bodies, but he believed that the soul notwithstanding might have the power to change the direction of the motions that are made in the body; much as a rider, though giving no force to the horse he mounts, nevertheless controls it by guiding that force in any direction it pleases. (I.60, Leibniz 1978, 6:135–36/Leibniz 1985b, 156)88

On the view here, then, not only later Cartesians but also Descartes concluded on the basis of constraints deriving from his physics that immaterial minds cannot produce new motion in the material world, but can only change the direction of motions that already exist. It is beyond doubt that certain Cartesians accepted the “change of direction” account of voluntary action. There is, for instance, a 1660 letter from Descartes’s literary executor, Claude Clerselier, appended to the third and last volume of Clerselier’s Lettres de Descartes, which concerns “l’action de l’Ame sur le Corps.” In this letter, Clerselier claims that God alone can “give the first motion to body, or to imprint in it a completely new motion that increases the quantity of that which is already in the world.” But though no finite mind can add to the quantity of motion, still such a mind “could have the power to change the direction of motion that is in bodies” (Clerselier 1667, 641). Here is a possible source for Lebiniz’s claim in the

88. See also the 1714 Monadology (§80, in Leibniz 1978, 6:620–21/Leibniz 1989, 223).

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Theodicy that the soul can have “the power to change the direction of the motions that are made in the body.” However, there is even clearer evidence of the influence of the discussion of mind-to-body action in Of the Body and Soul Conjoined in Man (Corporis et Animæ in Homine Conjunctio), a work of the Dutch-trained Cartesian Johann Clauberg.89 In his text, Clauberg claims that the commonsense view that “the mind produces certain changes in the body” seems contrary to the fact that “God is truly the efficient, creative, and conserving cause of all motions,” whose action, as immutable, accounts for the fact that the quantity of motion in the world can be neither increased nor diminished.90 He proposes to eliminate this tension by appealing to the fact that “the human mind is not a physical cause of bodily motions in the man, but only a moral one, since it no more than guides and directs those other [motions], and forms those motions, which already are in the body, by which means that part [of the human body] is agitated.” Significantly, given Leibniz’s remarks in the Theodicy, Clauberg continues by comparing the action of the soul on body to the case where “the driver joins the horse to the wagon, and turns to that place, and thus directs the motion of the wagon that the horse truly produces as the physical cause” (Clauberg 1968, 1:221). There is thus some reason to think that when he attributes the change-of-direction account to Descartes, Leibniz is thinking not only of Clerselier’s appeal to our “power to change the direction of motion,” but also of Clauberg’s position that the human mind merely guides and directs the motion that God has already created and conserved. Whatever the actual source of Leibniz’s understanding of the change-of-direction account, though, there is still the question whether this account can be found in Descartes. Over a century ago, Norman Smith argued for the negative on the grounds that though Descartes frequently speaks of the motion of the “animal spirits” as being merely directed (not originated) by the movements of the pineal gland, he never, so far as we know, suggests that those movements of the pineal gland, which are involved in voluntary action, can be explained in a similar manner as previously existing and merely guided by the mind. (Smith 1902, 83, n. 2)

Though this judgment has its defenders in the recent literature,91 Peter McLaughlin has insisted that Leibniz “was basically right both on the historical question of what Descartes meant to say about conservation and change of direction and on the philosophical question of why he had to mean this” (McLaughlin 1993, 157). On the historical question, the evidence seems to me to favor the Smith reading over McLaughlin’s alternative. In a series of articles in the Passions that concern the

89. This text was originally published in 1664, though Leibniz may have had access to the version published in 1691 in Clauberg’s posthumous Opera Omnia Philosophica (of which Clauberg 1968 is a reprint). 90. Clauberg here cited theses concerning motion found in his Physica Contracta, §§146–47, in Clauberg 1968, 1:7. Cf. his more complete account of motion in Disputatio Physica, ch. 13, in Clauberg 1968, 1:97–103. 91. See Remnant 1979 and Garber 1983.

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precise nature of this action, Descartes speaks of the soul as “making the gland move” ( fait que la petite gland . . . se meut) (PS I.41, AT 11:360), as “making the gland lean” ( fait que la gland se penchant) to one side or the other (PS I.42, AT 11:360), and as “having the force to make the gland move” (a la force que la glande se meut) in a particular manner (PS I.43, AT 11:361). The final claim that the soul has “the force” to move the gland is particularly significant given Descartes’s earlier contention to Elisabeth that the notion of the union involves the notion of “the force that the soul has to move the body” (AT 3:665). Here, it seems, the soul does not merely guide motion, but has a force that produces such motion. McLaughlin cites as evidence for the Leibnizian reading passages in which Descartes speaks of the mind as merely “determining” the motion of the animal spirits.92 However, this evidence is far from conclusive. For one thing, it is relevant, given Smith’s comment quoted above, that these passages concern the motion of the animal spirits rather than the motion of the pineal gland. They therefore seem to leave open the possibility, to which Smith drew attention, that the soul indirectly determines this motion by directly moving the pineal gland. Moreover, the reference in Descartes to the force of the soul to move body is significant in light of his view in a letter to Mersenne, which McLaughlin himself cites, that “force is needed only to move bodies and not to determine the direction in which they are to move” (11 June 1640, AT 3:75). Whereas McLaughlin concludes that “the Cartesian mind acts on the body in a forceless manner,” since it merely determines its direction (McLaughlin 1993, 163), I think the conclusion must be rather that Descartes takes our mind to have the force needed to move bodies. It must be admitted, however, that we do not have a clear and final word from Descartes on the status of mind-to-body action. Though he had a long-standing goal of providing a treatment of such action that relates it to his mechanistic account of body, such a goal was never fully realized. In the early Treatise on Man, Descartes promised a treatment of “the body on its own,” “the soul, again on its own,” and “how these two natures would have to be joined and united in order to constitute the men who resemble us” (AT 11:119–20), but in fact considered mainly the human body, with some remarks concerning the manner in which “nature” has linked bodily motions to sensations. Later, in the Principles, he noted that his third law of nature, governing changes in motion due to collision, covers only corporeal causes of such changes,93 and that he was reserving consideration of “the power that human or angelic minds have of moving bodies” (PP II.40, AT 8-1:65) for another treatise. However, this treatise was never written, and so whatever opportunity there was to address directly the manner in which mind-to-body action relates to the three laws of nature and the conservation principle was lost. We do have the Passions, but there is no consideration there of how the power of the soul to act on the body relates to the laws that govern body–body interaction. This text merely appeals to the fact that

92. The evidence is from the Meditations and the Description du corps humain; see McLaughlin 1993, 166–67. 93. For more on the view that this passage restricts the law to corporeal causes, see chapter 3, note 61.

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in certain instances, at least, the soul affects the animal spirits by moving the pineal gland. It might be thought that Descartes provided a hint of his final view when he allowed for the possibility in the passage from the Principles just cited that mind-tobody action is exempt from the third law. Daniel Garber has recently drawn attention to this “escape clause,” as well as to Descartes’s claim in the Principles that his conservation principle allows for changes in the quantity of motion that “evident experience or divine revelation render certain” (PP II.36, AT 8-1:61).94 The reference here to “evident experience” is particularly telling given his comment in the 1648 letter to Arnauld that such experience reveals that our soul can move body. On the basis of these texts, Garber finds reason to conclude that “Descartes might have answered Leibniz’s attack on interactionism by simply denying that the conservation laws hold for animate bodies” (Garber 1983, 116). My own sense is that if pressed, Descartes’s initial reaction would indeed have been to deny that the conservation principle and related laws governing motion apply to the case of mind-to-body action. Certainly, he gave no signs of a willingness to sacrifice the dictate of evident experience that our soul has a real force to move our body. But though the evidence seems to me to be stacked against McLaughlin’s answer to the historical question of whether Descartes embraced the change-of-direction account of voluntary motion, there remains the philosophical question of whether there are reasons internal to his system for him to accept this account. And with respect to this question, McLaughlin seems to me to have the upper hand.95 Garber has claimed that though Descartes’s conservation principle requires that God cannot add to the total quantity of motion in the world, it provides no reason to think that finite minds cannot add to this quantity (Garber 1983, 115–16).96 But it is far from clear that additions to motion by finite minds leave the constancy of God’s action untouched. I have emphasized the conservationist view in Descartes’s physics that God’s ordinary concursus consists simply in the continuation of his act of creating particular quantities of matter and motion (see §3.3). Insofar as there are no additions to these quantities, Descartes could say that this concursus alone suffices for the conservation of the material world. If finite minds could add to the quantity of motion, however, then that additional quantity could be

94. McLaughlin takes Garber to task for his assumption that this passages concerns changes in the quantity of motion rather than changes in the distribution of motion (McLaughlin 1993, 177, n. 52). However, the exceptions that PP II.36 allows are clearly to the constancy of the quantity of motion. The distribution of the motions is not at issue in this article. 95. Even so, McLaughlin’s insistence on the point that the material world is a closed causal system (e.g., McLaughlin 1993, 158–59) does not seem to me to be clearly reflected in Descartes’s texts. I think we can do better by focusing on the implications of Descartes’s conservationist physics. 96. Cf. Remanant’s view that the doctrine of primitive notions in Descartes’s 1643 correspondence with Elisabeth suggests that animate bodies are governed by a set of laws distinct from those governing inanimate bodies (see Remnant 1979, 382–84). As Garber notes, however, it cannot be the case that animate bodies are exempt from all laws governing inanimate bodies, including those governing the geometrical properties (Garber 1983, 118–19).

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retained only if God supplemented his initial act of creation with additional acts that yield the conservation of this new quantity.97 But then it would seem that Descartes could not say, as he apparently wants to say in the Principles, that God’s ordinary concursus consists simply in the continuation of his initial act of creation. We have seen the suggestion in the Principles that there could be exceptions to the conservation principle that are revealed by “evident experience,” that is, experience of mind-to-body action, or “divine revelation,” and in particular the revelation of miracles. But the exceptions that experience reveals would be a greater threat to Descartes than the miraculous exceptions that divine revelation requires, insofar as only the latter are supposed to leave God’s ordinary concursus untouched. Precisely this threat is reflected in the claim in the passage above from Leibniz’s letter to Arnauld that “it does not appear probable that God is constantly transgressing, on the occasion of every act of will by minds, the general law of nature that the same amount of force must continue to exist” (Leibniz 1978, 2:94/Leibniz 1985a, 118). A world in which finite minds could add to the quantity of motion over time would be a world that God cannot conserve by his ordinary concursus alone, at least on the account of that concursus that Descartes provided in the Principles. In such a world there would indeed be a constant transgression of the immutability of God’s conservation of the world by means of the same act with which he created it. In requiring such a transgression, the case of the addition of motion by finite minds is similar to the problematic case of the “force for resisting” in Descartes’s physics (see §§3.1.2 (iii) and 3.3). I have argued that this case is problematic because it requires not just the conservation of a constant quantity, but also the addition in collision of an instantaneous impulse to resist motion. It is difficult to see how the introduction of these momentary resistive impulses could be said to derive simply from the divine concursus that Descartes identifies with God’s continuation of his original act of creating a world with a particular quantity of matter in motion. But in the same way, it is difficult to see how such a concursus alone could yield the conservation of any new motion that finite minds produce. In contrast, any changes in the direction of motions that finite minds introduce would not threaten the conservation principle. For as Descartes makes clear, that principle concerns only the total quantity of motion and not the direction of the motions. So considerations drawn from the metaphysics of Descartes’s physics ultimately do seem to me to support the change-of-direction account of voluntary motion, just as

97. Garber notes that Descartes’s claim in a letter to More that God’s motive force consists in his conserving “the same amount of transference in matter as he put into it in the first moment of creation” (Aug. 1641, AT 5:404) seems to suggest the “strange position” that God fails to conserve any additional motion that finite minds add (Garber 1983, 132, n. 70). Garber’s conclusion is that we should not read this remark so literally, but should rather take Descartes to indicate only that God conserves just the amount of motion that existed during the previous moment. I find this reading of Descartes’s remarks to More to be strained, and would suggest as an alternative that he simply carries over his view in the Principles of God’s ordinary concursus without realizing the complications required for the admission of additions to the quantity of motion provided by finite minds.

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Leibniz suggested. McLaughlin concludes from this fact that we should attribute to Descartes “the strong philosophical position attributed to him by Leibniz, which is at least compatible with the texts” (McLaughlin 1993, 182). But given that the position Leibniz attributes to Descartes in fact is not compatible with the texts, a better conclusion would seem to be that Descartes never quite got around to thinking his account of mind-to-body action through to its foundations. Had he done so, he could have discovered the need to reconcile such action with the sufficiency of the divine concursus that his conservationist physics requires. Descartes’s conservation principle need not create similar problems for his account of body-to-mind action. It is not necessary that bodies gain or lose motion in order to trigger the activity of the innate mental faculty that Descartes posited in the Comments (see §4.2.2). Rather, the nature of this faculty is such that the mere presence of these motions affects it in such a way that it forms particular sensory ideas. The fact that Descartes feels compelled to posit a mental faculty and to speak of the motions as “giving occasion” for this faculty to produce the ideas draws attention to complications for body-to-mind action that are not present in the case of mind-to-body action. But such complications do not derive from Descartes’s conservationist physics. There is another case of casual action that the constraints of his physics leaves untouched, namely, the mind’s causation of its own states. In the Passions, these actions are said to result in volitions that we experience “as proceeding directly from our soul and as seeming to depend on it alone” (PS I.17, AT 11:342). Though, as its title indicates, this text focuses on the passions of the soul rather than its actions, an account of volition is nonetheless crucial for its central teaching that we should restrict our desires to what depends only on our free will (see, e.g., PS I.144, AT 11:436–37). Since the production of volition does not itself involve any gain or loss of motion, there is no threat here to the divine concursus that yields a constant quantity of motion in the material world. However, Descartes’s insistence that we freely produce our own volitions may seem to threaten his acceptance of a strong form of divine providence. Indeed, he himself notes this tension when he claims in the Principles that it is beyond our power to reconcile our freedom with the fact that “the power of God, by which he not only foreknew from eternity all that is or can be, but also willed and preordained it, is infinite” (PP I.40, AT 8-1:20). Of course, Descartes was not the first to worry about the compatibility of divine preordination with human freedom. As we will discover in the following chapter, scholastic disputes concerning this issue are germane to his own struggles with it. But the reference in the passage from the Principles to the divine preordination of what can be broaches what is perhaps the most idiosyncratic feature of Descartes’s theory of causation, namely, his famous (and notorious) doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. As we will discover, this doctrine plays an important though subtle role in his account of the relation of our freedom to divine providence.

5

Causation and Freedom

In an entry from a notebook that he composed as a young soldier traveling through Europe, Descartes observes that “the Lord has made three miracles: something from nothing, free decision, and God in man” (Tria mirabilia fecit Dominus: res ex nihilo, liberum arbitrium, et hominem deum) (AT 10:218). The first two of these miracles are directly relevant to his theory of causation.1 The miracle of “something from nothing” of course recalls Descartes’s conclusion that the act by which God conserves the world is not distinct from the act by which he creates it ex nihilo (see §2.2). But this chapter focuses on the miracle of free decision, or more specifically the freedom of our will, which as I hope to show is an important element of Descartes’s theory of causation. To understand the connection between the issues of causation and human freedom in Descartes, it is helpful once again to consider the scholastic context. Toward the end of §1.2.3 (ii), I noted the objection to Suárez, deriving from Durandus, that the concurrentist conclusion that God is the “proximate and immediate cause” of our sinful action conflicts with the claim that such action is free. As we know, the response in Suárez is that God’s concursus with our free action is compatible with our ability—essential for our freedom—to do otherwise even given that all the conditions for action have been posited. Though our will determines such action, for Suárez, there is nothing, including the divine concursus, that determines the will to do so.

1. Though the last mystery of “God in man” is less obviously relevant to Descartes’s theory of causation, it bears some relation to the union of mind with body, for in both cases it is the unity of a composite of parts with diverse natures that is at issue (see §4.1).

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In §5.1, I begin with a consideration of two problems that confront Suárez’s account of human freedom. The first concerns the relation between the will and judgment. Suárez’s view of judgment presupposes a scholastic account of the mental faculties that differs in fundamental respects from the account that Descartes later defended. Nevertheless, he considers an objection to his account of free will that is relevant to Descartes’s treatment of freedom, namely, the objection that our will does not seem to have freedom of indifference given that it is determined by our intellect. Suárez’s response to this objection turns on the claim that in this life, at least, any sort of intellectual determination depends on a prior act of our will that is itself undetermined. The second problem for Suárez’s account of human freedom concerns the compatibility of his insistence on the indifference of free human action with the traditional Catholic doctrine that God exercises complete providential control over creation. This problem is connected to a heated theological dispute in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that pitted Jesuits against members of the Dominican order. Suárez attempts to defend the Jesuit line by developing the view in the work of his contemporary Luis de Molina that divine providence is made possible by a special “middle knowledge” of undetermined human action. I argue in this chapter that ultimately we must place Descartes with Suárez on the Jesuit side of this debate. However, I also claim that Descartes must be distinguished from Suárez and other Molinists insofar as his account of freedom is informed by his distinctive but difficult doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. I close this first section with a consideration of Descartes’s account of created truth, with particular attention to the complications it introduces for his theory of causation in general and for his treatment of human freedom in particular. I then turn in §5.2 to the issue of Descartes’s somewhat conflicted attitude toward the Jesuit position in Suárez that human freedom requires “indifference” in action. In the Fourth Meditation, Descartes not only offers an account of judgment very different from what we find in Suárez, but also indicates that the will is most free when it is determined in a manner that wholly excludes indifference. Nevertheless, there is reason to think that even in this case Descartes accepts the view in Suárez that perceptions are not efficient causes of the action of the will. Moreover, in both the Principles (1644) and correspondence with Jesuits dating from the mid-1640s, there is some movement toward Suárez’s position that free human action precludes any sort of thoroughgoing intellectual determination. These texts still have a non-scholastic emphasis on the role of free will in assent to truth. However, the role of free will in the pursuit of the good—which is more familiar from Suárez—is prominent in the account of human freedom that Descartes provides in his last published work, the Passions of the Soul. One reason that scholars have taken Descartes to be a “compatibilist” with regard to free human action is that some of his statements seem to indicate a commitment to the position that God fully determines everything in nature, including our free action. If, as I argue in this chapter, his final account of human freedom is fundamentally “incompatibilist” in nature, we need to rethink his account of divine providence and its relation to free human action. In §5.3, I offer an interpretation of this account that draws on Suárez’s claim that God’s middle knowledge of our free action derives from his comprehensive grasp of the dispositions in us from which this action results in a

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nondeterministic manner. The corresponding position that I attribute to Descartes is that God produces our free action by making it the case that this action derives in a nondeterministic manner from the inclinations of our will. For Descartes, then, just as God can make essences from which truths derive necessarily, so he can produce inclinations from which our actions derive predictably but nondeterministically. The implication here that God determines free human action only indirectly, by producing a special sort of volitional inclination, ultimately serves to reinforce the conservationist reading of Descartes’s theory of causation that I have been concerned to defend.

5.1. JESUIT FREEDOM AND CREATED TRUTH 5.1.1. Suárez on Human Freedom Suárez’s views on human freedom belong to what can be called the “voluntarist” tradition in scholasticism. This sort of voluntarism must be distinguished from the “voluntarist axiom” that I discussed earlier with respect to Suárez’s renovation of scholastic metaphysics (see §1.2.1). Recall that that axiom affirmed the power of God to produce in separation really distinct creatures. But Bonnie Kent has noted that in the context of later-medieval scholasticism, “ethical voluntarism” indicates “a strong emphasis on the active character of the will, the claim that the will is free to act against reason’s dictates, and the conviction that moral responsibility depends on this conception of the will’s freedom.”2 In contrast to the case of the voluntarist axiom, ethical voluntarism is concerned primarily with the nature of free human action, and not with the nature of divine power. Nevertheless, the two kinds of voluntarism are rooted in the Paris Condemnation of 1277. As we have seen, the voluntarist axiom derives from the rejection in this proclamation of certain Thomistic restrictions on divine power.3 However, the Condemnation includes a section of twenty articles on the topic of the human will. The overall concern in this section is to condemn the position that the will is subordinated to reason. For instance, this section prohibits the following article: “That the will necessarily pursues what is firmly believed by reason and that it cannot abstain from that which reason dictates. This necessitation, however, is not compulsion but the nature of the will” (Lerner and Mahdi 1995, 350). The “intellectualist” view here that the will is by its nature subservient to reason was popular among certain Thomists. Just as Suárez’s acceptance of the voluntarist axiom set him against a hard-line Thomist ontology, then, so his emphasis on the importance of indifference for human freedom set him against a Thomistic form of intellectualism.4

2. Kent 1995, 94–96, citing the characterization of voluntarism in Bourke 1970, 1:138, 147. For more on discussions of human freedom in later medieval philosophy, see Eardley 2006. 3. As indicated in chapter 1, note 35. 4. As indicated in chapter 1, notes 35 and 37, Cajetan is one of the main Thomistic opponents of the voluntarist axiom. Among the Thomists that Suárez cites as opposed to his account of freedom is the Dominican Chrysostom Javellus (1470–1538) (MD XIX.6, ¶3, 720).

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There is an issue here whether Thomas himself was as much of an intellectualist as some of his followers claimed. In fact, Suárez insisted that his voluntarist position was for the most part in line with Thomas’s own position.5 But the focus here is not on Suárez’s Thomas scholarship, but rather on the manner in which he responded to the account of human freedom that some Thomists claimed—rightly or wrongly— to derive from Thomas’s writings. I indicated at the outset of this chapter two features of this account that Suárez, in line with other Jesuits, took to be problematic. The first concerns the intellectualist view that the will is determined by intellectual judgment. On this point, Suárez held that our will has a sufficient amount of indifference to act against such judgment. The second concerns the claim that divine providence requires a knowledge of free human action that is made possible by God’s predetermination of such action by means of “physical premotion.” Against this claim, Suárez insisted that divine providence involves a middle knowledge of this action that does not compromise its undetermined nature. Let us consider in turn these elements of Suárez’s response to the Thomists. (i) Judgment and Indifference Suárez and his Thomist opponents shared an Aristotelian conception of the will as rational appetite. Qua rational, the will is a power of the intellectual soul rather than, as in the case of sense appetite, the soul-body composite. However, both the will and the sense appetite, qua appetite, are directed toward the good as presented either by the senses or by the intellect. In contrast, the senses and intellect are apprehensive powers directed toward the true, with the senses being powers of the composite and intellect a power of the soul alone. As opposed to the view that Descartes later defended, most scholastics, including Suárez, simply assumed that judgment concerns truth and, as such, is an operation of an apprehensive faculty. Whereas sensory judgment is an operation of the senses that involves the apprehension of sensible features of objects, rational judgment is an operation of the intellect that involves the apprehension of intelligible features of objects. Beyond these basic points, however, there was considerable controversy within scholasticism concerning the relation of the will to rational judgment and the relation of both to “free decision” (liberum arbitrium). Whereas intellectualists understood the conception of the will as rational appetite to indicate that the will is subordinate to rational judgment and cannot act contrary to it, Suárez follows other voluntarists in insisting that the will is more noble than and thus can control the

5. For Suárez’s invocation of Thomas, see, among many other places, MD XIX.8, ¶10, 1:729. As Kent notes, however, late-thirteenth-century masters who defended a voluntarist account of the will, such as William de la Mare (†c. 1290) and Walter of Bruges (†1307), did so in explicit opposition to Thomas (Kent 1995, ch. 3). The question of whether Thomas was more of an intellectualist or a voluntarist is still a matter of dispute today; cf. Pasnau 2002, 220–33, which defends a primarily intellectualist (and compatibilist) reading of Thomas’s account of freedom; and Stump 1997, which defends a primarily voluntarist (and incompatibilist) interpretation of this account.

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intellect. In contrast to those who held that free decision is rooted in the intellect, moreover, he argues that the intellect is wholly determined to assent to the true and dissent from the false, and so cannot be the source of freedom. Since the will is directed to the good of the object, however, and since some objects can be both good and evil in different respects, there can be some indifference on the part of the will with respect to whether to pursue or avoid such objects. The conclusion here is that free decision is rooted in the will rather than the intellect (MD XIX.5, ¶14, 1:716).6 Suárez notes that there are two sorts of necessity with respect to acts of will. First, there is the necessity that involves coercion, which is to be contrasted with uncoerced and voluntary acts of will. But there can be a sort of necessity even with respect to voluntary acts in cases where the goodness of the object that the intellect presents determines the will to act in a particular manner. Suárez holds, for instance, that the will of the blessed is determined by the beatific vision to love God (MD XIX.8, ¶8, 1:728–29).7 Moreover, he grants that even in this life, our will is not able to will contrary to an end proposed under the concept of a universal good; in his terms, this end determines the will with respect to the specification of its act (¶15, 1:730). Yet Suárez insists that though the will acts voluntarily in these cases, it lacks the freedom that precludes any determination to a particular act (MD XIX.2, ¶9, 1:695). This robust sort of freedom, which adds “indifference” in action to voluntariness, is required for the justice of reward and punishment for our actions (¶16, 1:698). It may seem that given his emphasis on the value of the freedom that involves indifference, Suárez would claim that the will is less perfect when the intellect determines its voluntary act of will than when the will itself determines its voluntary act in a manner that involves freedom of indifference. However, he in fact says that the perfection of the acts of will is determined by the rule that an object be loved in proportion to its worthiness or capacity; so that if a given object is the highest and most necessary good, then it is loved with complete necessity, whereas if it is a lesser or non-necessary good, then, correspondingly, an act with respect to it is under the control of the one who loves it. (MD XIX.8, ¶21, 1:732)

When the will is not determined to pursue nonnecessary goods, it has a perfection of control over action that allows for merit. But even though this perfection is lacking both in the case of the blessed who love God necessarily and in our own case when we are unable to act contrary to the universal good, still there is in these cases the perfection of the will that consists in its determination to the good. Nevertheless, Suárez holds that in this life, at least, the perfection of the will consists more in the perfection of control than in the perfection of determination to the good. Even in the case of the end of the universal good, where our will lacks freedom of specification, he insists that we are free to refrain from acting altogether, and

6. In taking free decision to be a power of the will, Suárez opposes not only those who take free decision to reside in something external to the will, but also those who identify it with an act or habit rather than with a faculty; see MD XIX.5, ¶4, 1:712. 7. As Suárez indicates in this text, he sides with Thomas against Scotus on this point.

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so retain freedom of exercise. And in the case of all particular goods that our intellect naturally apprehends in this life, including God, our will has both freedom of exercise and freedom of specification. All such objects can be considered as evil or inconvenient, and thus as something that the will can refrain from loving or can even hate (¶16, 1:731). Though judgment concerning the goodness of particular objects can move the will as a final cause, the fact that it does not determine either the exercise of the will or the specification of its act reveals that it is not the efficient cause of the decision of the will.8 Cases where judgments seem to be efficient causes of free decision are to be explained by the volition to pursue particular goods as ends or means (¶8, 1:722). Suppose, for instance, that I resolve to satisfy my craving for sweets. Given this resolution, the judgment that particular objects are conducive to this end compels me to pursue those objects. However, the efficacy of the judgment is conditional on my resolution. If I withdraw the resolution (due, for instance, to concerns about my weight), then the judgments will not necessarily lead me to pursue the objects they present. Since, according to Suárez, I as a free agent have some indifference to all resolutions concerning particular objects, and thus can withdraw such resolutions, there is no judgment concerning such objects that can, by itself, determine my will. Suárez’s concern with the pursuit of particular goods distinguishes his discussion of human freedom from the remarks on this topic in Descartes, which, as we will see, tend to focus on the case of assent to particular truths.9 However, there is one aspect of Suárez’s discussion that will prove useful in understanding certain developments in Descartes’s treatment of human freedom. I have in mind Suárez’s view of how it is that the will can resist those judgments that lead it to pursue particular goods. He notes that with respect to such judgments, the will is able either to suspend its act or to divert the intellect from thinking about the object; or to apply [the intellect] to investigating more carefully, regarding that object, how much goodness it has and whether it has conjoined to it some evil or inappropriateness in light of which the will is able not only not to love it but even to hate it. (MD XIX.6, ¶14, 1:724)

Thus, in cases where I freely decide to pursue sweets, I could have resisted the judgment that sweets are good insofar as they satisfy my cravings for them by distracting myself from thinking about sweets or by considering the goods that derive from

8. Cf. the discussion in §1.2.2 (iii) of Suárez’s account of final causality. There is some question whether Suárez allowed that judgment is an efficient cause of volition in the case where, as in the case of the blessed, it determines the will with respect to both exercise and specification. His claim that there is no reason for the cognition of a good object to be an efficient cause, since appetite is moved toward that object by its own nature and not by any external agent (MD XIX.18, ¶49, 1:646), may seem to reveal that he did not. To be sure, the passage indicates that the goodness involved here is not such that it determines the will. As I indicate in §5.2.1 at note 40, however, Su´arez indicates that the intellect is not an efficient cause of the will even in the case of cognition of a necessary good. 9. As we will also discover in §5.2.3, though, Descartes’s treatment of freedom in the Passions pushes to the forefront the case of the pursuit of the good.

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resisting sweets. Given this view in Suárez, it is not too surprising that the emphasis on the ability of the will to distract the intellect reappears in Descartes at just the point where he is attempting to accommodate the Jesuit account of human freedom (see §5.2.2). (ii) Divine Providence and Middle Knowledge In 1597 Pope Clement VIII established a Congregation on Grace (Congregatio de Auxiliis) to review the Concordia of the Jesuit Molina.10 The publication of this work ignited a controversy that pitted members of the recently formed (in 1540) Society of Jesus against members of Thomas’s established Dominican order, most prominently Domingo Bañez (1528–1604). Most objectionable to Bañez and other Dominicans was the denial in the Concordia that God determines free human action. For Molina’s critics, this denial threatens divine providence. When Molina died in 1600, rumor had it that the Congregation was on the verge of declaring his views to be heretical. However, due in part to the reconciliationist efforts of the Jesuit Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), the Congregation ultimately ended in a draw, and Pope Paul V issued a decree in 1607 that forbids the two sides from labeling the views of their opponents heretical or even temerarious. This decree promised an official resolution of the dispute at “an opportune time,” which time we still await.11 As a result of the 1607 decree, it is theologically acceptable for Catholics to endorse either the Molinist views in the Concordia or the opposing views of Molina’s Dominican critics. Both sides in fact agree that God creates in a providential manner, and that such providence requires that prior to the divine decision to create a particular world God knows all future contingent propositions concerning that world, including those propositions concerning free human actions in that world. The dispute principally concerns the explanation of how God has knowledge of the latter sort of proposition. According to Dominicans such as Bañez, God is able to know in advance how human agents would freely act in certain circumstances because his “efficacious concursus” determines those free actions that are good, whereas his failure to offer such a concursus results in those free actions that are evil. For Molina, however, this account of foreknowledge is unacceptable insofar as it involves the determination of free human action by the granting or withholding of an efficacious concursus. On the view that Molina shared with Suárez, our actions can be free only if they involve an indifference that is incompatible with this sort of determination. Thus, God’s foreknowledge of such actions cannot be grounded in his free decrees concerning his own concursus. Rather, such knowledge must derive from God’s simply seeing that free agents would decide to act in certain ways in certain circumstances, even though such action is determined neither by the circumstances nor by the causal contributions of the divine will.12

10. For the full title of the Concordia, see chapter 1, note 71. 11. For an account of the Congregation and of Bellarmine’s role in it, see Brodrick 1961. 12. For a summary that is sympathetic to the Molinist side of this dispute, see the editor’s introduction to Molina 1988. For a discussion more sympathetic to the Dominican side, see Osborne 2006.

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This is the Molinist theory of “middle knowledge” (scientia media), so called because it posits a sort of divine knowledge of free human action that stands between God’s “natural” knowledge of necessary features of creation and his “free” knowledge of contingent features of the created world that his will determines. The theory of middle knowledge was theologically objectionable for Dominicans because it seemed to render the goodness of our action independent of God’s providential action. But there is also the philosophical objection that Molina has provided no ground for the truth of the propositions that God foreknows concerning free human action. Molina must reject the claim that knowledge of God’s concursus provides the foundation, for the reasons just indicated. But the free agents themselves cannot provide the foundation, since middle knowledge is logically prior to God’s creation of a world containing such agents. Thus, there seems in the case of middle knowledge to be truths without truthmakers.13 Molina attempted to explain God’s ability to know truths concerning free human action by appealing to the “absolutely profound and absolutely pre-eminent comprehension, such as is found only in God with respect to creatures” (Molina 1988, Disp. 52, §11, 171). However, this theory of “supercomprehension,” as it has come to be known, was not satisfactory even for Molina’s Jesuit defenders. Most notably, Suárez rejects this theory. In his On the Knowledge That God Has of Future Contingents (De Scientia quam Deus habet de Futuris Contingentibus), he objects that the appeal to the fact that God “supercomprehends” (supercomprehendit) an object cannot explain God’s knowledge of free human action, since what provides the foundation for such knowledge is not the perfection of the mode of knowledge but rather the perfection of the object of God’s knowledge (perfectio in cognitione solum . . . ex parte rei cognitae). The fact that God knows the free agent perfectly is thus to be explained by an appeal to the fact that the object of this knowledge reveals all truths concerning the free action of this agent (Opera 11:366).14 What, then, is the object that explains middle knowledge? Suárez’s most explicit answer can be found not in On Knowledge but rather in his Treatise on Divine Grace (Tractatus de Gratia Dei).15 In the Treatise he appeals to God’s intuitive knowledge of the “immediate disposition of the cause to a future effect” (per immediatem habitudinem causae ad effectum ex hypothesi futurum) (Opera 7:94). In particular, the object is the habituo, or disposition, of a possible agent that would yield a particular effect in certain circumstances. Though it is compatible with the nature of this

13. For a contemporary formulation of this philosophical objection to middle knowledge, see Adams 1990, 114–15. 14. Even so, someone like Suárez might want to retain the view in Molina that God can have this sort of complete knowledge only of objects he infinitely surpasses to explain the fact that he does not have middle knowledge of his own free actions. For this point, see Freddoso’s remarks in the introduction to Molina 1988, 51–53. 15. Though the claim in On Knowledge that God knows conditional contingent propositions concerning free human action “by the infinite power of representation of his ideas” (ex vi infinitae repraesentationis suarum idearum) (Opera 11:369) anticipates the position in the Treatise.

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disposition that it not yield such an effect, the idea that God has of it allows him to know that the disposition would in fact lead the agent to act in this manner.16 Calvin Normore has helpfully explained Suárez’s position here in terms of the claim that God has a “perfect model” of each possible being that allows him to simulate possible histories to determine how a particular agent A would behave in the simulated circumstances C. Normore notes that “if there is a way in which A would behave in C, a perfect model should reflect it, so if the conditional excluded middle is valid, such a model is possible and God knows the history of the world by knowing that model, i.e., by knowing his own intellect and his creative intentions” (Normore 1985, 15). Of course, the Bañezian critic could reply that prior to God’s decree concerning his own concursus, there is no fact of the matter as to how A would behave in C, and so nothing for the perfect model to capture. In effect, then, this response involves a rejection of the conditional excluded middle.17 But assuming that there is a fact of the matter here, and thus that the conditional excluded middle holds, it seems that God could know it by intuiting the results of his simulation of the history of the agent. Molina and Suárez appealed to the theory of middle knowledge to overcome the apparent conflict of claims concerning divine providence and foreknowledge with their view that our actions are free in a sense that precludes their determination. A similar sort of conflict seems to resurface in Descartes’s Principles. Toward the end of chapter 4, I noted a worry in this text concerning divine preordination of free human action. This problem derives from the claim, in the title of article 40 of the first part of this text, that “everything is preordained by God.” In the article itself, Descartes notes that “we can easily entangle ourselves in great difficulties if we attempt to reconcile this preordination of God with our free decision [arbitrii nostri libertate], and to comprehend both together” (AT 8-1:20). In the following article, he claims that we can avoid this conflict by remembering that our finite mind cannot comprehend the infinite power by which God “not only knew from eternity what is or can be [quae sun aut esse possunt], but also willed and preordained it.” In particular, we cannot comprehend how such a power “leaves free human actions undetermined [indeterminatas].” However, Descartes concludes that our inability to comprehend does not preclude us from accepting “the freedom and indifference [libertatis . . . et indifferentiae] that is in us,” since “we are so conscious [conscios] of this freedom that there is nothing that we comprehend more evidently and perfectly” (PP I.41, AT 8-1:20). Certainly the reference here to the undetermined nature of our “freedom and indifference” is significant in light of the emphasis in the work of Suárez and other Jesuits on the fact that human freedom requires an indifference that precludes determination. I have more to say presently concerning the relation of these remarks in the Principles to the Jesuit position (see §5.2.2 (i)). For the moment, however, I want to consider the fact that the conflict with which Descartes is concerned in his text differs in some significant respects from the conflict that Molina and Suárez addressed. These Jesuit theologians were concerned only with the question of how, given the fact that our free

16. For the connection between middle knowledge and divine ideas, see the passage from On Knowledge cited in note 15. 17. For a similar objection, see Adams 1990.

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actions are undetermined, God could know conditional propositions concerning these actions prior to willing to create in a particular manner. In contrast, Descartes finds problematic not only that God foreknew these actions but also “willed and preordained” them. Of course, someone like Suárez could hold that God wills and preordains such actions in the sense that he intentionally creates that world which he (eternally) foreknew would include the actions as part of its history. Yet there is no precedent in the work of Suárez and the other Jesuits for Descartes’s claim that God’s infinite power produces all that not only is but also “can be.”18 For the Jesuits, God knows what can be by means of his natural knowledge of necessary features of the world. Such knowledge derives not from his will but rather from ideas in his intellect. In his 1630 letter to Mersenne, however, Descartes introduced the doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths, according to which such truths “have been established by God and depend as entirely on him as the rest of his creatures” (15 Apr. 1630, AT 1:145). In a subsequent letter he told his correspondent that God established these truths “as efficient and total cause,” and that “he is the Author of the essence as well as of the existence of creatures” (27 May 1630, AT 1:152; italicized text in Latin). For the Jesuits, God’s middle knowledge of our free action is akin to his natural knowledge of the essences of creatures in being independent of any determination by his will. But given Descartes’s created truth doctrine (as I call it for short), there can be no natural knowledge, much less middle knowledge, of creatures. All truths concerning creatures are subject to God’s will, and so even truths concerning our free action are so subject. The mystery in the Jesuits of how God could have prevolitional knowledge of our undetermined action is therefore replaced by the mystery in Descartes of how truths concerning such action could be founded ultimately in a divine will that is the efficient cause of all truths concerning creation. The mystery in Descartes would appear to be more intractable insofar as it seems contradictory to say that the divine will determines truths concerning free actions that are themselves undetermined. One easy way out would be to claim that since the created truth doctrine allows that God can do the impossible, it raises no additional problems for the view that God brings about the impossibility of determining undetermined action. In the course of this chapter, however, I hope to show that this doctrine yields a more sophisticated response to the problem of God’s determination of free action, one that can accommodate certain aspects of the Jesuit theory of middle knowledge that distinguish it from its Dominican competitors. To set the stage for this argument, I consider Descartes’s created truth doctrine. However, I begin with questions concerning the scope of the doctrine that broach certain complications for his theory of causation that are not restricted to the special case of free human action.

5.1.2. Descartes on Created Truth When Descartes launched his created truth doctrine in 1630, he mentioned to Mersenne only “the mathematical truths you call eternal” (15 Apr. 1630, AT 1:145). However, in the 1641 Sixth Replies, he indicated that the scope of this doctrine extends far beyond

18. Cf. the claim earlier in the Principles that “God alone is the true cause of all that is or can be [sunt aut esse possunt]” (PP I.24, AT 8-1:14).

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mathematical truths, and indeed seems to be without limit, since “no good or truth, nothing worthy of belief or action or omission, can be feigned the idea of which is in the divine intellect before his will determines to bring it about that it be such” (AT 7:432). Similarly, in a 1648 letter Descartes told Arnauld in an unqualified way that “every basis of truth and goodness depends on [divine] omnipotence” (AT 5:224). In a groundbreaking discussion, Frankfurt has argued that Descartes’s created truth doctrine in fact has universal scope (Frankfurt 1977, 40). He has further claimed that Descartes understood this doctrine to entail a “universal possibilism” on which eternal truths, including truths concerning God, are “inherently as contingent as” or “no more necessary than” any other propositions (42). In Frankfurt’s view, Descartes took the apparent necessity of these truths “properly to be understood only as relative to the character of our minds” (45). God has created our minds such that we perceive the eternal truths to be undeniable, but he could just as easily have created us and the world and even himself differently. Jonathan Bennett has proposed an alternative to Frankfurt’s interpretation that nonetheless takes all eternal truths to fall under the scope of the created truth doctrine. Bennett offers on Descartes’s behalf a “conceptualist” account on which the necessity of the eternal truths is to be analyzed in terms of our own mental capacities. To say that a truth is necessary is simply to say that we cannot distinctly conceive the opposite of such a truth (Bennett 1994, 647). Thus, the created truth doctrine amounts to the position that God has created our minds such that we cannot conceive the opposite of any eternal truth. As evidence for this reading of the created truth doctrine, Bennett appeals, among other passages, to Descartes’s remark in correspondence with Arnauld that “I do not think we should say of anything that it cannot be brought about by God,” but “I merely say that he has given me such a mind that I cannot conceive” the opposite of the eternal truths, since “such things involve a contradiction in my conception” (29 July 1648, AT 5:224).19 Bennett clearly differs from Frankfurt insofar as he rejects the attribution to Descartes of any sort of universal possibilism. Indeed, in Bennett’s view Descartes accepted rather the opposite; all eternal truths are necessary in a conceptualist sense. In one respect, however, his reading is close to Frankfurt’s. For both, the perceived necessity of the truths is tied to the constitution of our minds. The difference is simply that Frankfurt takes this sort of perceived necessity to be merely apparent, whereas Bennett takes it to be that in which Descartes’s necessity consists. However, the implication here that even truths concerning God reduce to a created feature of our mind is difficult to square with certain claims in Descartes. Most notable is his insistence in the Fifth Meditation, with respect to the truth that essence and existence are inseparable in God, that “it is not my thought that effects [efficiat] this, or imposes any necessity on anything, but on the contrary it is the necessity of the thing itself, namely, the existence of God, that necessarily determines me to thinking this” (AT 7:67). Here it is something outside of my thought—namely, God’s essence—that provides the reason for God’s existence and thus grounds the determination of my thought to consider his existence as necessary.

19. Bennett 1994, 656–61.

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In other writings Descartes accords eternal truths concerning God a special status that they cannot have on the interpretations Frankfurt and Bennett have offered. Thus, he insists in his 1630 correspondence with Mersenne that “the existence of God is the first and the most eternal of all possible truths and the one from which alone all others proceed” (6 May 1630, AT 1:150). Moreover, he closes out his initial discussion of the created truth doctrine in this correspondence by noting that the “essence of created things” is nothing other than eternal truths that are “no more necessarily attached to [God’s] essence than are other created things” (27 May 1630, AT 1:152–53). Given these remarks, the created truth doctrine would seem to be restricted to whatever is not necessarily attached to God’s essence, and thus not include those truths concerning this essence that surely are so attached. Even if the necessity of created eternal truths is bound up with the manner in which God creates our mind, the suggestion in these passages is that the necessity of truths concerning God’s essence does not derive from his will, but rather serves as the uncreated ground for the necessity of created eternal truth. The claim that Descartes allowed at least in certain passages for uncreated truths concerning God’s own essence is not new.20 What I think commentators have failed to appreciate, however, are the complications this sort of restriction on the created truth doctrine introduces for Descartes’s theory of causation. The first complication concerns the issue of the cause of God’s existence. Earlier I considered Descartes’s exchanges with his critics concerning his suggestion in the Third Meditation that God derives his existence from himself. I noted Descartes’s conclusion that God’s nature serves as a “formal” rather than an efficient cause of his existence (see §2.1.2 (ii.a)). This special treatment of the case of God’s existence is relevant also to the causal axiom—which he introduces in the Second Replies—that “no thing exists of which it cannot be asked what is the cause why it exists.” Anticipating the objection that no cause is required in the case of God’s existence, Descartes adds that “this can be asked even of God himself, not because he needs any cause in order to exist, but because the immensity of his nature is the cause or reason [causa sive ratio] why he needs no cause to exist” (AT 7:164–65).21 What is significant, with respect to the created truth doctrine, is the implication here that though the truth that God exists has a reason in the immensity of the divine nature, this nature does not provide the sort of efficient causal explanation for this truth that is required in the case of all created truths. Moreover, the fact that the truth that God exists requires an ultimate reason serves to distinguish it from created eternal truths. For Descartes notes in the Sixth Replies, in a passage cited earlier, that it is repugnant that the will of God not be indifferent from eternity to all that has been made or will be made, since no good, or truth, or believing, or doing, or refraining from doing can be feigned [ fingi potest], the idea of which is in the divine intellect prior to his will determining or making it to be so. I am not speaking here of temporal priority; there is not any priority or order, or nature, or “considered reason” [ratione rationcinata], as it is called, such that this idea of good impels God to choose one thing rather than another. (AT 7:431–32)

20. See, for instance, Wells 1982. 21. For an extensive discussion of this axiom and its implications, see Carraud 2002, ch. 2.

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Given the essential indifference of divine action, there can be no preexisting ideas that provide reasons for God’s creation of the eternal truths. Not only is there no reason for this creation that we can comprehend; there is no reason God can comprehend either. So whereas the divine nature provides the reason for God’s existence, there is nothing that can provide a reason for the divine production of created truth. There is some question whether the result of the created truth doctrine that God can have no reasons for action is consistent with the implication in Descartes that God contains the reality of the creatures he creates. I have noted the requirement of Descartes’s containment axiom that the “reality or perfection” of an effect be contained in its (total or adequate) cause “formally or eminently” (see §2.1.3). But Descartes himself indicates that this axiom has unrestricted scope, and so requires that even in the case of divine creation the effects must be contained eminently in God. To be sure, the specific account of eminent containment that I attributed to Descartes seems to be consistent with this requirement. Recall that on this account, a cause eminently contains its effect in virtue of possessing the power that suffices to produce the objective reality that is present in the cause’s idea of that effect (see §2.1.3 (ii)). Surely God has the power to produce the objective reality of any ideas he may have of his effects. The problem, however, is that the reality of the effect that is contained eminently in finite minds is supposed to provide a basis for its causation of the effect. However, Descartes makes clear that there can be no idea that conditions divine creation. Given this position, God contains not the reality of his effects (in contrast to the case of finite minds), but rather a power that is able to produce the reality of these effects ex nihilo (a power totally lacking in finite minds).22 This difference between the divine and created minds introduces a further complication for Descartes’s insistence on the similarity of our will to God’s. His claim in the Fourth Meditation is that it is in virtue of his “will or free decision” (voluntas sive arbitrii libertas) that “I understand myself to bear some image and likeness of God [imaginem quandam et similitudinem Dei]” (AT 7:57).23 The claim that our will is made in the “image and likeness” of the divine will is weakened to a considerable extent by the admission, which follows the passage from the Sixth Replies just cited,

22. In the Use of Reason. Descartes’s later follower Regis (see chapter 1, note 77) argued, on the basis of a version of the created truth doctrine, that God does not see creatures in his perfections, because it has been proved that the perfections of God have nothing in common with creatures, and by consequence that they cannot represent them; we must say only that God sees creatures in his will, insofar as it is by his decrees that he produces and conserves them. (Regis 1996, 169) Elsewhere in this text, Regis also claimed that God is an “analogous” cause that, in contrast to univocal and equivocal causes, contains his effects neither formally nor eminently (406–07). For further discussion of Regis’s position and its relation to Descartes, see Schmaltz 2000. 23. Cf. the claim toward the end of the Third Meditation that “from the one fact that God created me, there is a strong reason to believe that I have been made in some way in his image and likeness [imaginem et similitudinem], and that I perceive that likeness, which includes the idea of God, by the same faculty that enables me to perceive myself” (AT 5:51), as well as the comment on this claim in the passage from the Conversation with Burman considered in §2.1.2 (i).

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that “the indifference that belongs to human freedom is much other [longe alia] than [the indifference] of divine [freedom].” This admission prefaces Descartes’s claim that whereas human indifference “does not belong to the essence of human freedom,” since it involves an ignorance of reasons that leads our mind in one direction rather than another, God’s supreme perfection requires that he be indifferent in such a way that “no good or truth . . . can be feigned the idea of which is in the divine intellect prior to his will determining or making it to be so” (AT 7:432–33). But given this admission, it seems that Descartes is not warranted in claiming, as he does in the Fourth Meditation, that the divine will is not greater than our own “considered in itself formally and precisely” (AT 7:57).24 As we will discover in §5.2, however, these remarks reflect only one stage in the evolution of Descartes’s views on human freedom. In passages from later writings, he increasingly emphasizes the undetermined nature of our free action. Though this shift in his thought perhaps reduces somewhat the difference between the divine and human wills just noted,25 it also introduces the problem for the compatibility of the created truth doctrine with human freedom that I mentioned toward the end of §5.1.1 (ii). Recall Descartes’s acknowledgment in the Principles that it is difficult to comprehend how it is that the power by which God not only knows but also wills and preordains “whatever is or can be” could leave “free human actions undetermined.” The claim that God wills what “can be” reflects the implication of Descartes’s created truth doctrine that eternal truths derive from the indifferent divine will. But this doctrine requires that there be no truth, or at least no truth concerning the created world, that is independent of God’s will. Even contingent truths concerning our undetermined free actions can hold only because God has freely willed that it be so. This result of the created truth doctrine may seem to place Descartes on the side of the Dominicans in their battle with the Jesuits on the issue of the relation of free human actions to God. For Dominicans such as Bañez held that the divine will is the source of truths concerning such actions. What the Dominicans could not accept, however, is Descartes’s insistence in the Principles that God’s power leaves our free action “undetermined.” Moreover, there is his later claim in the Passions that everything follows necessarily from God’s immutable decree alone “except for those things that this same decree has willed to depend on our free will” (PS II.146, AT

24. Descartes holds in the Principles that the term ‘substance’ cannot apply “univocally” to God and creatures given that God is dependent on no other being, whereas created substances depend on God (PP I.51, AT 8-1:24). Nonetheless, as I have argued in Schmaltz 2000, he allowed for the traditional Thomistic position that God is related in an analogical manner to creatures. One might think that in a similar manner Descartes could say that even though our will differs fundamentally from the divine will, nonetheless an analogical relation holds between the two. One problem with this proposal, however, derives from his insistence in the Fourth Meditation that his will is “so great that I apprehend no idea of any greater” (AT 7:57). In contrast to the case of substantiality, then, the suggestion here is that the sort of perfection that pertains to his will is not different in kind from the perfection that pertains to God’s will. 25. Though Descartes never admitted that human freedom requires the sort of indifference from any consideration of truth and goodness that is essential to divine freedom.

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11:439).26 So Descartes seems to have wanted to combine the Dominican position that truths concerning our free action derive from the divine will with the Jesuit position that God leaves these truths under the control of our will. The obvious question here is whether there is any intelligible way to combine these seemingly conflicting positions. In the Principles, Descartes suggests that it is beyond our power to reconcile our freedom with God’s power, and it might be thought there is nothing more he can say on this issue. As I indicate in §5.3, though, Descartes has more to say elsewhere on the issue of the relation of our freedom to divine providence. What he has to say, moreover, can be linked to Suárez’s account of middle knowledge in terms of God’s idea of the habituo that results in free action. Before we consider Descartes’s views on this issue, though, we need to understand his attitude toward the sort of human freedom that Suárez associated with indifference. As I have indicated, he has a complex and evolving view of our free action. Whereas he starts in the Meditations with a non-Suárezian conception of human freedom as determination to the true, he ends in the Passions with a Suárezian emphasis on the importance to such freedom of control over pursuit of the good.

5.2. INDIFFERENCE AND HUMAN FREEDOM In the unfinished Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii), which he abandoned in 1628, Descartes distinguishes faith in what God has revealed from immediate knowledge both of first principles through intuition and of remote consequences of those principles through deduction. There he says that the acceptance of revelation, as well as of “anything obscure,” is set apart by the fact that it “is not an act of native intelligence [ingenii] but of will [voluntatis]” (RM III, AT 10:370). The view here that the acceptance of what is not intellectually evident derives from the will is something of a scholastic commonplace, as illustrated by Suárez’s remark that a person “who believes things that he does not see clearly . . . believes because he wills to,” which is why “theologians claim that the act of faith . . . depends on a pious disposition of the will” (MD XIX.5, ¶20, 1:717). However, Suárez made clear that the will is involved only in the case of judgments concerning the good, and not judgments concerning truth. All of the latter derive from the intellect alone, and even in the case of judgments concerning the truth of something that is less than evident, the strength of the assent of the intellect is tied to the clarity of its perception of its object (¶¶15–16, 1:716). Even in his early work, then, Descartes departs from the scholastic line in claiming that assent to the truth of claims that are obscure is an act of will rather than of intellect.27

26. For more on Descartes’s account of freedom in the Passions, see §5.2.3. 27. Cf. Thomas’s distinction between intellectus and scientia, on the one hand, where intellectual assent is moved by its object, and opinio and fides, on the other, where assent is moved not only by its object, but also by decision. On the view here, the will can command assent to propositions that do not themselves compel assent (ST II-II. 1.4). Nonetheless,

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In his later account of judgment, however, Descartes’s differences with the scholastics are even more pronounced. According to this account, judgment involves an act of will not only in the case of assent to obscure matters, but also in the case of assent to the results of intuition and deduction, or what he came to call the perception of “clear and distinct ideas.” This change from his position in the Rules introduces certain difficulties for his view of human freedom that derive from his commitment to the freedom of the will in its contribution to judgment. In particular, on his new account there appear to be two different kinds of freedom that judgment can involve. With respect to judgments concerning perceptions that are obscure, freedom seems to consist in the ability of the will to refrain from assenting even in cases where it does in fact assent. In contrast, we will see the indication in Descartes that the nature of the will is such that it is impelled by clear and distinct ideas to assent. Given this view, the sort of freedom involved in the case of clear and distinct perception seems to involve intellectual determination rather than the ability to do otherwise. A related problem is that it is unclear which of these two kinds of freedom is most primary. In passages associated with his account of freedom in the Fourth Meditation, Descartes emphasizes that the will is most free when it is most determined by the intellect, and thus lacks any sort of indifference. However, he later makes the claim in the Passions, which I have noted already, that God leaves it to the will alone to determine its free action. We will discover that with this shift there is a corresponding move from an initial preoccupation with the role of the will in assent to truth to a final acknowledgment of the importance to human freedom of the control of the will over its pursuit of the good.28

5.2.1. The Fourth Meditation In his set of objections to the Meditations, Arnauld counsels that Descartes make clear that his discussion in the Fourth Meditation “is dealing above all with mistakes we commit in distinguishing between the true and the false, and not those that occur in pursuit of good and evil” (AT 7:215). In response, Descartes notes that “the entire context of my book” makes clear the restriction to the consideration of truth and falsehood (AT 7:247–48). Nevertheless, on the basis of Arnauld’s remarks, he asked his editor Mersenne to insert into the Synopsis of the Meditations the disclaimer that “it should be noted in passing that I do not deal [in the Fourth Meditation] at all with sin, i.e. the error which is committed in pursuing good and evil, but only with the error that occurs in distinguishing truth from falsehood” (AT 7:15).29

Aquinas insisted that even in cases where the will commands assent, the assent itself is an act of intellect rather than (as Descartes would have it) an act of will. 28. The importance for Descartes’s account of freedom of the shift in his thought from a focus on the search for truth to a consideration of the pursuit of the good is highlighted in Schickel 2005. 29. Descartes made this request in To Mersenne, 18 Mar. 1641, AT 3:334–35. The restriction to the consideration of truth had been indicated in the First Meditation (AT 7:22) and in the Second Replies (AT 7:149).

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For scholastics such as Suárez, the restriction to the case of the consideration of the true and the false would involve as well a restriction to the role of the intellect in judgment. In the Fourth Meditation, however, Descartes insists that all judgments require contributions both from the “faculty of knowledge” ( facultate congnescendi), that is, “the intellect” (intellectu), and from the “faculty of election or freedom of decision” ( facultate eligendi sive . . . arbitrii libertate), that is, “the will” (voluntate). The former contributes merely “the ideas from which judgments can be made,” which strictly speaking are not themselves true or false. Truth or falsity enters only with the assent or dissent of the will with regard to these ideas (AT 7:56).30 Descartes is most concerned in the Fourth Meditation to argue that mistakes in judgment are our fault, since they derive from the fact that we have failed to restrict our will to clear and distinct ideas. In cases where our ideas are confused or obscure,31 the judgmental act of our will is not determined, and thus we are “indifferent” to these ideas. Given this indifference, we are able to refrain from judgment, and so to avoid falling into error. Here we may seem to have a parallel to the case in Suárez of our pursuit of an object that is not perceived to be a necessary good. For Suárez emphasized that in the case of such a pursuit our will is indifferent in the sense that it has the ability in the very same circumstances to refrain from such a pursuit. Just as Suárez held that the freedom involved in our pursuit of the good requires an ability to do otherwise, so it seems that Descartes allows that the freedom involved in our judgments concerning the true requires such an ability. However, the analogy is undermined by Descartes’s treatment of the role of the will in judgments concerning clear and distinct ideas. He notes that when he made such judgments, “a great light in the intellect was followed by a great inclination in the will, and thus the spontaneity and freedom of my belief were all the greater in proportion to my lack of indifference” (AT 7:59). Such judgments correspond most closely to the case in Suárez of the pursuit of a necessary good. But whereas Suárez claimed that the act of will involved in this pursuit cannot be free since indifference is lacking, and thus is merely voluntary, Descartes insists that the “spontaneity and freedom” of his will are “all the greater” because its action is determined by the intellect. This is not merely a verbal dispute over which acts of will are to be included in the extension of the term ‘free’. Rather, it is over which acts are paradigmatic instances of our freedom. For Suárez, as we have seen, only uncoerced acts that are indifferent have

30. In the Fourth Replies, Descartes insists that apart from judgment, ideas “have no reference to the truth or falsity of their objects,” and thus cannot be said to be “formally” true or false (AT 7:232). The discussion here concerns Arnauld’s objections to the remarks in the Third Meditation concerning the “material falsity” of ideas (see AT 7:206–7). For more on Descartes’s somewhat obscure notion of material falsity, see chapter 2, note 44. 31. In the Principles, Descartes defines a clear perception as one that “is present and accessible to the attentive mind” and a distinct perception as one that “as well as being clear, is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains in itself only what is clear” (PP I.45, AT 8-1:22). A perception can fail to contain in itself only what is clear, and thus be obscure, even though it is present to the attentive mind, and so is clear. However, if a perception fails to be present to the attentive mind, and so is confused, it is automatically obscure (see PP I.46, AT 8-1:22).

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Will

Coerced

Uncoerced voluntary

Necessary good

Non-necessary good

Determined by intellect

Freedom of indifference

(Perfection of determination to good)

(Perfection of control required for merit)

FIGURE 5.1 Suárez on the Will

the perfection of control that is essential for human freedom. Though determined volitional acts have the perfection of being determined to the good, this perfection does not allow for the merit that pertains to genuinely free human action (see figure 5.1). The distinction between coerced and uncoerced acts of will is not so clear in Descartes.32 However, his main difference from Suárez concerns the relation between voluntariness and freedom. Whereas Suárez emphasized that voluntariness is distinct from a true freedom involving indifference, Descartes speaks in the Fourth Meditation as if the spontaneity involved in voluntary action is equivalent to freedom, and indeed claims in the Second Replies that it is “the essence of the will” that it is carried “voluntarily and freely” (voluntarie . . . et libere) toward what is clearly known to be good (AT 7:166).33 Far from being paradigmatic instances of freedom, judgments involving indifference are presented in the Fourth Meditation as being imperfect instances of freedom, since they involve “a defect of knowledge or a kind of negation.” It is only when we are impelled by our clear and distinct ideas to embrace the truth that we are “wholly free” in a manner that excludes all indifference (AT 7:57–58). The account of free will in the Fourth Meditation (see figure 5.2) indicates a clear alternative to what we find in Suárez. The suggestion in the Fourth Meditation that determination to the true rather than indifference is a defining aspect of the freedom involved in our judgment is reflected

32. In contrast to Suárez, Descartes does not mention explicitly in the Fourth Meditation the case of coerced action. Presumably this is because coercion does not seem to be a consideration in the case of assent to ideas. However, the definition of will in this text does mention lack of determination by an external force, and it seems that one could contrast cases where such force limits options to a single undesirable one from cases where there is no such constraint. 33. See also the claim in the Sixth Replies that since a person has a will that is determined to the true and the good, “it is evident that he will embrace the good and the true all the more willingly [libentius], and thus also more freely [liberius], that he sees more clearly” (AT 7:432).

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Coerced (?)

Uncoerced voluntary = free

Clear and distinct ideas

Confused or obscure ideas

Freedom of spontaneity

Freedom of indifference

(Perfect freedom = determination to the true)

(Imperfect freedom = lack of determination)

FIGURE 5.2 Free Will in the Fourth Meditation

in comments on this text in which Descartes emphasizes that God’s freedom differs in fundamental ways from our own. Drawing on his created truth doctrine, Descartes claims in the Sixth Replies that divine perfection requires that nothing can determine God to will anything, and thus “the supreme indifference to be found in God is the supreme indication of his omnipotence.” However, he notes that in our case “not only are we free when ignorance of what is right makes us indifferent, but we are most free when a clear perception impels [impellit] us to pursue something” (AT 7:432–33). In contrast to the case of God, then, the perfection of our freedom consists in the determination to the true (and the good) rather than in an indifference to action. One might object at this point that Descartes’s remarks in the Fourth Meditation indicate more ambivalence on the issue of what is essential to our free will than I have allowed. In particular, there is the famous passage in which he claims that our will “consists only in the fact that we can do or not do (that is, affirm or deny, pursue or flee), or rather [vel potius] only in that when something is proposed by the intellect to us for affirming or denying, or pursuing and fleeing, we are carried [feramur] in such a way that we sense no power external to us that determines us to it” (AT 7:57). Scholars have disagreed over what kind(s) of freedom the two clauses of this passage endorse, and what the vel potius connector is supposed to indicate. One prominent view is that the two clauses offer two different kinds of freedom, with the first clause indicating a “freedom of indifference” that requires a contracausal ability to do otherwise, and the second clause indicating a “freedom of spontaneity” that does not require such an ability.34 The vel potius connector is then read either as a retraction of the definition of free will in terms of freedom of indifference,35 or as an indication that our will can exhibit either kind of freedom.36

34. See especially Kenny 1972, which distinguishes between “liberty of indifference” and “liberty of spontaneity.” Cf. Gilson 1913b and Beyssade 1994. 35. Gilson 1913b, 310; Beyssade 1994, 206. 36. Kenny 1972, 18.

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However, it seems that vel potius is best read as indicating not a retraction or a qualification, but rather an equivalence, as in, “or in other words.” The question, then, is whether freedom of indifference is to be understood in terms of freedom of spontaneity or the other way around. Though some have argued that freedom of indifference is primary,37 I take the primacy of freedom of spontaneity to be indicated by passages we have just considered in which Descartes emphasizes that indifference is not essential to human freedom. Thus, I understand the claim that we “can do or not do (that is, affirm or deny, pursue or flee)” to affirm our ability to determine our own action in a manner that precludes determination by an external power.38 This determination involves indifference in cases where we lack clear and distinct ideas, but even in cases where we possess such ideas, our will remains the source of the fact that we are carried inevitably toward what the intellect represents to us.39 I propose that we understand Descartes’s view that the will determines its own free action in terms of Suárez’s account of the relations between the faculties of intellect and will in action. Earlier I noted the claim in Suárez’s De Anima, with respect to the production of appetition, that “apprehension is required, not as an efficient cause, but as an application to the object” (DA V.3, ¶8, Opera 3:760) (see §4.2.1). This claim is reflected in his view in the Metaphysical Disputations that cognition is merely a necessary condition for an appetitive act directed toward the cognized object, and that this faculty rather than the cognition itself is the efficient cause of the act (MD XVIII.7, ¶49, 1:646). To be sure, the particular passage from the Disputations is concerned only with cognition of nonnecessary goods (in particular, sensory goods), and it might be thought that appetition must move itself simply because its act is not determined by cognition. However, elsewhere in this text Suárez appeals to Thomas in support of the view that the function of the intellect is simply “to illuminate, direct and regulate the operations of the will,” and not to move the will as an efficient cause (MD XIX.6, ¶7, 1:721).40 The indication here is that cognition serves merely as a final cause that moves the will to act on its own. Even in the case where the intellect presents a necessary good, it only instructs the will to determine itself in a particular manner.

37. See, for instance, Alanen 2003, 240–46, and Ragland 2006a and 2006b. 38. For a similar view that freedom is equated in this passage with an ability of the will to determine itself, see Hatfield 2003, 192–98. But see note 43. 39. Cf. Campbell’s view that the first clause of Descartes’s definition requires that there be genuine alternatives even in the case of clear and distinct perception, but that these alternatives are compatible with the determination of action in the actual case. This is what Campbell calls “two-way compatibilism” (Campbell 1999). See also the emphasis in Ragland 2006a on the importance of alternative possibilities for freedom. However, toward the end of the Fourth Meditation Descartes stresses that his will would be free even if God precluded the possibility of error either by restricting his deliberation to clear and distinct perception or by impressing on his memory the importance of making judgments only in the case of such perception (AT 7:61). There is no indication here of the requirement that alternatives be open to him. I take this same point to count against the view that Descartes’s definition in the Fourth Meditation indicates the necessity for freedom of a contracausal power to do otherwise (see the work cited in note 37). 40. Suárez cites ST I-II.9.1 and 3.

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Descartes admittedly does not use the notion of final causality in describing the relation of perception to the will. However, he also refrains in passages connected to his account of freedom in the Fourth Meditation from referring to such perception as an efficient cause of the will. It is true that he speaks of perception as “impelling” (impellit) the will (Sixth Replies, AT 7:433), and this may seem to suggest an efficient causal relation. However, in other passages he indicates that the impulsion is to be understood in terms of the will being “drawn” (fertur) by perception (Second Replies, AT 7:166), or of something being “proposed” (proponitur) in perception for action on the part of the will (Fourth Meditation, AT 7:57). In general, the stress in the Fourth Meditation is on the distinction between the passive intellect, which merely offers up ideas for consideration, and the active will, which acts on those ideas.41 Given this emphasis, it seems that the relation between perception and the will is better conceived in terms of an agent being drawn toward a perceived end, as in Suárez, rather than in terms of a perception being an efficient cause of an effect in a patient.42 The remarks in the Fourth Meditation also appear to allow for a Suárezian understanding of indifference in terms of a contracausal power to do otherwise. After all, when Gassendi objects to the account of indifference in this text on the grounds that our will is determined to judge in a particular manner even when perception is obscure (Fifth Objections, AT 7:317), Descartes responds by insisting that our will has “the freedom of moving itself, without the determination of the intellect, in one direction or another” (Fifth Replies, AT 7:378).43 In the case of judgments concerning clear and distinct ideas, however, there is no indication that the will has the power “of moving itself in one direction or another.” To be sure, Descartes could still say that even in this case our will can do or not do in the sense that it determines itself to act. He in fact does say that our freedom is most perfect in this case given that it is the

41. See also Descartes’s claim that will and intellect “differ only as the activity and passivity of the same substance. For strictly speaking, understanding is the passivity of the mind and willing is its activity” (To Regius, May 1641, AT 3:372). 42. In §3.2.1 (i), I noted the problem that the suggestion in the discussion in PP II.37 of the first law of nature that even minds never change “unless by external causes” (AT 8-1:62) seems to conflict with Descartes’s claim that our will can be a source of internal change. We can now see that the problem derives from Descartes’s view that (setting aside the difficult case of God; see §5.3) nothing external to our will can be an efficient cause of its free action. However, on the Suárezian position that I attribute to Descartes, perceptions could serve as final causes of such action. Descartes also held that perception is required for judgment involving the assent of the will (see, e.g., PP I.34, AT 8-1:18), and it seems that he would allow that it is required for any act of will. Thus, he could hold that even in the case of changes due to free action, a cause external to the will is required, albeit a final rather than an efficient cause. 43. But cf. Hatfield’s claim that for Descartes, indifference “is not incompatible with the will being determined by other factors, such as habit, to choose one way rather than another” (Hatfield 2003, 194; the reference here is to Descartes’s remarks in what I call in §5.2.2 (iii) “the Jesuit letter”). Though Descartes is concerned in his response to Gassendi only with external determination by the intellect, and not by internal determination by habit, I take his claim in this response that our will “can guard against our erring” by “moving itself in one direction or another” to indicate a stronger sense of indifference than Hatfield suggests.

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nature of the will to be carried to the true (and the good). But certainly the implication here that our freedom is compatible with the fact that the nature of our will necessitates its being drawn to clear and distinct ideas would have been troubling to Suárez. Though we will discover that Descartes came to be worried by this implication in his later writings, at the time of the Meditations he seems to have been content to identify the freedom of our will with a self-determining activity that is not negated but rather perfected by clear and distinct perception.

5.2.2. Mid-1640s Developments Some commentators have found in Descartes the consistent affirmation of a particular account of human freedom, though without agreeing on the precise nature of this account.44 In contrast, my argument here is that his view of human freedom evolved over time.45 We have seen the emphasis in the Fourth Meditation and related texts on a kind of freedom that is most perfect when our will is determined by its nature to assent to clear and distinct ideas. However, during the mid-1640s, after the publication of the second Latin edition of the Meditations in 1642, Descartes increasingly emphasizes the importance of our control over the will in free action. Though he still acknowledges during this time the determination of our will to clear and distinct ideas, he also increasingly attempts to allow for some dependence of this determination on choice. We see this development in Descartes’s thought first in his account of human freedom in the Principles (1644), and then in his commentary on the Fourth Meditation in two letters, the first a 1644 letter to the Jesuit Denis Mesland, which I call the Mesland letter, and the second an undated letter most likely from around this same time and almost certainly addressed to a Jesuit correspondent, which I call the Jesuit letter.46 (i) Principles I have noted the emphasis in the Principles on the problem of reconciling the fact that “everything is preordained by God” with the fact that we experience a “freedom and indifference” (libertatas et indifferentia) in ourselves exhibited in our “undetermined” (indeterminatas) actions (PP I.40–41, AT 8-1:20). Here already there seems to be a dramatic shift from the emphasis in the Fourth Meditation on a kind of freedom that is most perfect when indifference is completely absent. Yet there are some important 44. Cf., for instance, the view in Campbell 1999 that Descartes consistently accepted a compatibilist account and the view in Alanen 2003, 240–46, and in Ragland 2006b that he consistently accepted an incompatibilist account. 45. Here I develop the evolutionary account of Descartes’s views on human freedom that I first presented in Schmaltz 1994. 46. Cf. the discussion of the Mesland and Jesuit letters in Marlin 1986, which criticizes the analysis of this correspondence in Kenny 1972. Though he anticipates my conclusion below (against Kenny) that the Jesuit letter marks an important break from Descartes’s earlier views, Marlin does not mention the sort of problems that I do with the positive account of freedom in this letter.

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qualifications in the remarks in the Principles that indicate that the differences are not as great as they may first appear to be. For instance, in this text Descartes restricts his consideration of our freedom “to assent or not to assent at will” to cases in which matters are “not completely certain and examined” (PP I.39, AT 8-1:19). Moreover, he continues to insist there that our nature is such that “whenever we perceive anything clearly, we assent to it spontaneously [sponte], and can in no way doubt that it is true” (PP I.43, AT 8-1:21). There is thus no denial here of the determination of our will toward clear and distinct perception that Descartes highlighted in the Fourth Meditation.47 What is missing in the Principles, however, is his earlier claim that such a determination constitutes a perfect form of freedom. Indeed, at one point in this text Descartes seems to indicate that genuine freedom precludes determination of action. Thus, he notes there that whereas automata cannot be praised for producing certain motions, since “they necessarily exhibit” such motions, we can be praised for embracing the truth, since “it is more credit to us when we embrace because we do it voluntarily, than would be the case if we were not able not to have embraced” (PP I.37, AT 8-1:18–19). In contrast to the view in the Fourth Meditation, voluntariness is contrasted with cases where one cannot do otherwise.48 To be sure, there is no explanation in the Principles of how the fact that “we were able not to have embraced” the truth is consistent with our inability to doubt our clear and distinct perceptions. So there are difficulties here that remain to be addressed. Even so, we are closer to the view in Suárez that any sort of freedom in us that involves merit must include an indifference that consists in a contracausal power to do otherwise.49 (ii) Mesland Letter In a 1644 letter to “a Reverend Jesuit Father,” identified in another letter as Denis Mesland,50 Descartes responds to questions about the Fourth Meditation that

47. For the view that these features of the Principles reveal that the account of human freedom in this text is compatible with the account in the Fourth Meditation, see Kenny 1972, 20–21, and Cottingham 1988, 250–52. 48. The French edition of the Principles replaces the reference to what is voluntary with what derives from “a determination of our will” (une determination de notre volonté) (AT 9-1:40). For discussion of the changes in this section of the Principles, see Beyssade 1996. 49. See also Descartes’s claim in a 1645 letter to Elisabeth that we experience in ourselves an independence “that suffices to make our actions praiseworthy or blameworthy” (3 Nov. 1645, AT 4:333), and his claim in a 1647 letter to Queen Christina that “it is only what depends on the will that is subject to reward and punishment” (20 Nov. 1647, AT 5:84). 50. In particular, Descartes indicates that Mesland is the correspondent in a later letter to a Jesuit, at AT 4:121.

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concern an indifference connected to our ability to suspend judgment. He begins by agreeing that we have this ability, but explains that it is certain, it seems to me, that a great light in the intellect is followed by a great inclination in the will; so that seeing very clearly that a thing is good for us, it is very difficult, and even, as I believe, impossible, as long as one continues in the same thought, to stop the course of our desire. But because the nature of our soul is such that it hardly attends for more than a moment to the same thing, as soon as our attention turns from the reasons by which we know that this thing is good for us, and we retain in memory only that it is desirable to us, we have the power to represent to our mind certain reasons that make us doubt, and suspend our judgment, and also maybe even form a contrary judgment. And so, since you regard freedom not simply as indifference but rather as a real and positive power to determine oneself, the difference between us is merely a verbal one, for I agree that the soul has such a power. (AT 4:116; italicized text in Latin)51

The claim here that it is impossible “as long as one continues in the same thought” to resist “a great light in the intellect” is in line with the view in both the Fourth Meditation and the Principles that our will is by nature determined to assent to clear and distinct perception. In light of the suggestion in the Principles that we possess a kind of “freedom and indifference” that involves merit, however, it is significant that Descartes does not merely stop in the Mesland letter with the claim that we act voluntarily even when we must follow the inclination of our will. Rather, he insists that even in the case where we are led by a great light of intellect, it is possible for us subsequently to be distracted and then consider reasons that lead us to suspend judgment. Thus, a continuing assent to clear and distinct perception requires a certain effort of attention that depends on the will rather than on that perception itself. Admittedly, there are remnants in the Mesland letter of the suggestion in the Fourth Meditation that perfect freedom consists in determined assent to clear and distinct perception. Thus, Descartes notes there that “we may earn merit even though, seeing very clearly what we must do, we do it infallibly, and without any indifference, as Jesus Christ did during this [earthly] life” (AT 4:117). Nevertheless, he also attempts there to accommodate the Jesuit view that indifference is essential to human freedom. For instance, he emphasizes that the indifference that he took to be accidental to freedom in the Fourth Meditation is merely one that involves some sort of defect in knowledge. He therefore allows for the view of his correspondent that the will is indifferent in the sense of having “a real power to determine oneself,” and concludes that any difference between them “is merely a verbal one” (AT 4:116). Descartes may appear to indicate a more than verbal difference when he

51. The remarks here are reminiscent of Descartes’s claim in the Fifth Meditation that though “my nature is such that so long as I perceive something very clearly and distinctly I cannot but believe it to be true,” it is also the case that “I cannot fix my mental vision continually on the same thing to keep perceiving it clearly,” and thus that “other arguments can now easily occur to me which might easily undermine my opinion, if I did not possess knowledge of God” (AT 7:69; cf. Second Replies, AT 7:144–46; Fourth Replies, AT 7:245–46).

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claims that whereas Mesland restricts freedom to a power of determination accompanied by indifference in the sense of the Fourth Meditation, he takes freedom to include “in the general sense what is voluntary” (AT 4:116). Here we seem to have the sort of substantive disagreement with the Jesuit position connected to the insistence in the Fourth Meditation that true freedom is exhibited in our determined assent to clear and distinct perception.52 In contrast to the case of this text, however, there is the admission in the Mesland letter that at least in the case of the continuation of this assent, there is a certain kind of dependence on an apparently undetermined effort of the will. (iii) Jesuit Letter The third stage of Descartes’s development during the mid-1640s is reflected in a Latin fragment of an undated letter that Adam and Tannery found in a manuscript from the Bibliothèque Mazarine and presented in their edition of Descartes’s writings as a continuation of a letter to Mesland written in French and dated 9 February 1645.53 It seems unlikely that Descartes would have switched languages midletter, and if Mesland were the correspondent it would be difficult to explain why crossreferences are missing from both the fragment and the Mesland letter. Even so, the fact that the fragment repeats many of the claims from the Mesland letter regarding indifference and its relation to free action allows us to be confident that it was composed around the same time. Moreover, we can be fairly certain that the fragment was from a letter to a Jesuit correspondent, since there is the same attempt that we found in the Mesland letter to accommodate the Jesuit emphasis on the importance of indifference for freedom. In line with his procedure in the Mesland letter, Descartes begins in the Jesuit letter by distinguishing the indifference considered in the Fourth Meditation, which involves merely a lack of impulsion of the will toward truth and goodness, and a kind of indifference that is identified with “a positive faculty of determining oneself to one or other of two contraries that is to pursuing or avoiding, to affirming or denying.” He then claims that our will has such a positive faculty not only when it possesses indifference in the Fourth Meditation sense, but also when it is moved by an evident reason to act in a certain way. Descartes cites as evidence that the action derives from the positive faculty of determination in this latter case the fact that

52. In fact, Kenny takes the position in the Mesland letter to be consistent with the view in the Fourth Meditation; see Kenny 1972, 23–24. 53. See the editorial comments on this letter in AT 4:172. As Kenny notes, Clerselier had earlier provided a French translation of this letter and dated portions of it from 1630 and 1637, whereas Adam and Tannery initially presented the French version of this letter as part of a May 1641 letter to Mersenne (Kenny 1972, 25–26). The former view of the letter is ruled out by the fact that it refers to the account of indifference in the Fourth Meditation, whereas the latter is implausible given its attempt to accommodate a Jesuit account of indifference to which Mersenne was not committed.

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although morally speaking [moraliter loquendo] we can hardly move in the contrary direction, absolutely [absolute] however we can. For it is always open to us to hold back from following a clearly cognized good, or from admitting a perspicuous truth, providing however that we consider it good to demonstrate the freedom of our decision by this. (AT 4:173)

Thus, the positive faculty essential for freedom requires not only that the will determine itself toward an evident reason, as the Fourth Meditation suggests, but further that the will have the ability “absolutely speaking” to move itself in a contrary direction even in the case of its consideration of such an evident reason. Descartes introduces a complication into his account when he continues by noting that before acts of will are elicited, freedom consists “either in a greater facility in determining oneself or in a greater use of the positive power we have of following the worse although we see the better.” We more easily determine ourselves when we follow evident reasons, but make greater use of the positive power in turning away from such reasons (AT 4:174). In addition to the positive faculty of determination, then, there is a positive power that is revealed in our choice of the worse, which involves not only indifference but also a kind of perversion.54 Presumably we exercise our positive faculty of determination both when we determine ourselves to follow evident reasons and when we exercise our perverse power. It is unclear, however, that the exercise of this power is involved in the case that Descartes cites in the letter, where we hold back from following a clearly cognized good since we consider it better to demonstrate our freedom by doing so. For in this case we seem to think it better to act in this way, and therefore appear not to “see” that this is a worse option. In general, it appears that the ability to do otherwise absolutely speaking does not require the exercise of a perverse power to do what we perceive to be worse. For we could be motivated to act contrary to evident reasons in cases where we (confusedly) perceive some good that follows from so acting to be greater than the good of being led by evident reasons. In any event, the suggestion in the Jesuit letter is that our freedom involves the possession of a positive faculty that allows us absolutely speaking to resist even clear and distinct perceptions. Ferdinand Alquié has argued that such a suggestion marks a decisive break with Descartes’s view in previous work, including the Mesland letter, that we cannot refuse assent to something clearly and distinctly perceived at the moment it is so perceived.55 But we could perhaps reduce the differences between the Mesland and Jesuit letters by drawing on the position in the former that when it is distracted from considering a clearly known good, our will can attend to reasons that lead it to suspend judgment or form a contrary opinion. When Descartes says in the Jesuit letter that absolutely we can move against evident reasons, he need not have meant that we can so move at the moment we perceive them. He could have meant, rather, that it is always in our power to distract attention in a way that allows us to act otherwise. Though the Mesland letter does not mention a power of

54. Following Kenny’s claim that this positive power involves a “liberty of perversion” (Kenny 1972, 28). 55. Alquié 1950, 288–92.

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distraction, it seems to leave room for the view that such a power explains the power we have to resist even evident reasons.56 Alquié therefore may well distinguish the views in the Mesland and Jesuit letters too sharply. Nevertheless, I think that he is correct to draw attention to an important shift in Descartes’s thought on human freedom during the mid-1640s. In particular there is a shift away from the focus in the Fourth Meditation on what Alquié has called la liberté éclaire—“the enlightened freedom” that occurs when the spontaneous assent of the will is determined by the clear and distinct perceptions of the intellect. What comes to be emphasized rather is what he has called la liberté positive—“the positive freedom” that occurs when the act of will is undetermined.57 This sort of freedom is indicated by talk in the Jesuit letter of a positive faculty of determination essential to freedom that includes the power “absolutely speaking” to turn away even from evident reason. Interestingly, the distinction in the Jesuit letter between what the will can do “morally speaking” and “absolutely” is present also in the Metaphysical Disputations. Suárez appeals to such a distinction in that text in particular to address the question of whether evil action presupposes an antecedent defect in intellectual judgment. He claims that though no such defect is “absolutely necessary” (absolute necessarium) for us to choose evil, still “morally speaking [moraliter loquendo] the will never lapses unless there is some antecedent defect in the intellect” (MD XIX.7, ¶¶10–11, 1:725–26). But Suárez’s use of this distinction differs in important respects from the use of it in Descartes’s Jesuit letter. For Suárez appeals to a defect in our intellect to explain our ability morally speaking to lapse into sin. In contrast, the indication in Descartes’s Jesuit letter is that the defect of thinking it would be good to demonstrate our freedom by turning away from evident reasons serves to explain our ability absolutely to resist reasons that we would otherwise follow morally speaking. Even so, toward the end of §5.1.1 (i), I alluded to the fact that another feature of Suárez’s account of human freedom sheds some light on the distinction in the Jesuit letter between what we can do absolutely and morally speaking. I have in mind Suárez’s claim that the influence of intellectual judgment on free action requires a prior resolution on the part of the will. Given a resolution to pursue a certain good, the judgment that particular objects are instances of such a good leads me to pursue

56. For a similar reading of the Mesland and Jesuit letters, see Kenny 1972, 28–30. However, Kenny does not draw attention to the fact that there is no mention in the Mesland letter of the power of the will to distract attention. Moreover, the suggestion in the Mesland letter that perfect freedom consists in the determined assent to clear and distinct perception is missing from the Jesuit letter. 57. Alquié 1950, 289–90. On the basis of close readings of the texts, Michelle Beyssade has argued that this sort of shift is reflected in changes to the Fourth Meditation in the 1647 French edition of the Meditations (Beyssade 1994). For a critique of this argument, see Campbell 1999, 187–89. I have already expressed my disagreement with Beyssade’s claim (cited in note 34) that the vel potius connector in the Latin edition of the Fourth Meditation indicates a retraction of the claim that a two-way power is essential to free action. However, my evolutionary account of Descartes’s views on human freedom conflicts with Campbell’s claim against Beyssade that these views were consistently compatibilist in nature.

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them. In the terms Descartes employs in the Jesuit letter, given this judgment I pursue such objects morally speaking. Since it is in my power to withdraw the resolution, however, absolutely I can resist the pursuit. As we have seen, Suárez even speaks of the will as having the ability to “divert the intellect from thinking about the object” that is presented as good. When read in light of the Mesland letter, the Jesuit letter indicates that our will has a similar power of diversion that can prevent us “from pursuing a clearly known good, or from admitting a clearly perceived truth” (AT 4:173). Of course, the reference here to the role of the will in the admission of a perspicuous truth reflects Descartes’s deep differences with the scholastics on the nature of judgment. Even so, it is interesting that in the Jesuit letter, he takes the turning away from a clearly perceived truth to be motivated by pursuit of an alternative good, in particular, the good of demonstrating freedom. A further movement toward Suárez is reflected in the indication in this letter that a consideration of the pursuit of the good can be important for an account of the role of the will in the search after truth. To be sure, I have cited several remarks above concerning the freedom of our will that date prior to the Jesuit letter but that mention not only our assent to the true but also our pursuit of the good. Even so, in the discussions of free will in the Meditations and the Principles, he tends to consider the former in abstraction from the latter. In contrast, the view in the Jesuit letter is that the freedom exhibited in the assent of our will to a clearly perceived truth involves a power to do otherwise “absolutely speaking” that is itself entangled with our pursuit of the good. To be sure, the suggestion in this letter that doing otherwise absolutely speaking requires the exercise of a perverse power of doing the worse tends to confuse matters. In the final account of the freedom of our will that he provides in the 1649 Passions of the Soul, Descartes focuses on less bizarre considerations that lead us away from the search after truth. As in the case of the Jesuit letter, however, these considerations involve the role of the will in the pursuit of the good.

5.2.3. Passions of the Soul In the Passions Descartes emphasizes that “the will is by its nature so free that it can never be constrained [contrainte]” and that its volitions are “absolutely in its power [absolument en son pouvoir] and can be changed only indirectly [indirectement] by the body” (PS I.41, AT 11:359). Volitions are here contrasted with passions in the strict sense, that is, certain confused and obscure perceptions that we refer to our soul rather than to our body or to external objects and that are “caused, maintained and strengthened by some motion of the spirits [in the body]” (I.27, AT 11:349).58 Such passions are “absolutely dependent on the actions that produce them, and can be changed by the soul only indirectly, except in cases where it is itself their cause” (I.41, AT 11:359–60). In cases where the passionate feelings do not have the soul as their cause, they can come into conflict with volitions deriving from the will. Thus,

58. In this text, Descartes also uses the term ‘passions’ more broadly to include all perceptions that have the soul or body as their cause (PS I.19, AT 11:343).

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the passion of fear that arises from battle may compete in the soul with the volition to act in a courageous manner (I.47, AT 11:364–66).59 In this sort of competition, it cannot be assumed that the volition will win out over the passion. Indeed, Descartes notes that “weak” souls allow themselves to be carried away by their strongest current passions. In contrast, “strong” souls are able to follow “determinate judgments” concerning action that conflict with such passions. Sometimes these judgments are themselves based on passions that have previously influenced the soul. In the case of the strongest souls, however, the judgments derive ultimately not from the passions but rather from “knowledge of the truth” as determined by clear and distinct perception (PS I.48–49, AT 11:366–68). Descartes is not very explicit on how the passions overwhelm weak souls. But though it is tempting to think that he takes these passions to be efficient causes of the volitions of such souls, it is important to remember the indication in the Passions that the body can affect volition only “indirectly.” My suggestion earlier, with respect to the relation between intellect and will in the Fourth Meditation, was that it was more appropriate to conceive of Descartes’s perceptions as final causes that lead the will to act in a particular manner than to conceive of them as efficient causes of effects in the will. Likewise, I propose here that we conceive of his passions as final causes that weak souls choose to follow. Passions can affect volition only indirectly, since they require the cooperation of the will, which itself is the efficient cause of its volitions.60 This sort of cooperation is precisely what strong souls refuse to afford their current passions, since they find it best to rely on their determinate judgments as guides in their pursuit of the good. Since Descartes’s earlier accounts of theoretical judgment tend to bracket considerations involving pursuit of the good, it is difficult to see how the will could refrain from assenting to clear and distinct ideas. Indeed, his suggestion in the Fourth

59. In this article, Descartes presents the competition as consisting in the conflict between a volition in the soul and a motion in the pineal gland that corresponds to the passion. Here he is resisting the traditional scholastic view that there can be conflicts internal to the soul that involve its sensitive and rational parts. However, it seems that even on Descartes’s own view there can be a conflict between a volition and a passion in the soul that corresponds to the motion in the gland. Thus, his differences from the scholastics do not seem to be as great as he suggests in this article. 60. Cf. Hoffman’s claim that remarks in the Passions allow for the position that perceptions in general, and passions in particular, can cause volitions by causing the soul to will in a particular manner (Hoffman 2003, 268–72). Hoffman also cites Descartes’s claim to Elisabeth that passions can cause the soul to lose its freedom as showing that he allows that volitions can be caused by the passions to be unfree (291–92, citing To Elisabeth, May 1646, AT 4:411). However, Hoffman’s textual evidence for the first point does not seem to me to show that volitions are passions deriving from bodily efficient causes. When Descartes allows in the Passions that volitions can be passions (in the broad sense), he has in mind merely that our soul perceives its volitions, not that volitions themselves can be passive effects of something other than the will (see PS I.19, AT 11:343). Moreover, the claim in the letter to Elisabeth can be read as saying not that the passions can cause unfree volitions, but rather that they can bypass judgment entirely in causing bodily behavior.

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Meditation is that the will determines itself without impediment in assenting to such ideas. However, the view in the Passions is that in the case of our pursuit of the good, the passions frequently provide a seductive alternative to knowledge of the truth. For the passions naturally move us to pursue the objects they present as beneficial to ourselves as a soul-body composite, and to flee those objects they present as harmful to that composite (PS II.137, AT 11:430). But though we have an immediate motivation to follow the passions, it is nonetheless the case that they “almost always make the goods as well as the evils they represent to be much greater and more important than they are” (II.138, AT 11:431). Whereas it is difficult to see how Descartes could allow that we resist a clear and distinct idea once we actually perceive it, it is easier to understand why he would have thought it requires some effort of will to resist a reliance on the passions in favor of arduous intellectual determination in attempting to distinguish good from evil. Moreover, acquiescence to the passions does not require the exercise of anything as exotic as the perverse power of doing the worse while seeing the better. All that is required is the inclination that all human souls have in virtue of their union with a body to judge good and evil immediately by means of the passions. I noted Descartes’s claim that the soul does not have direct control over the passions except in cases where “it itself is their cause.” In the Passions, the most notable case in which the soul has control is that of the passion of generosity (generosité).61 Not coincidentally, this passion is also the one most closely linked to our control over our own will. In the Passions, Descartes prefaces his discussion of generosity by making the point, which we saw earlier in the Principles, that “it is only those actions that depend on free decision [libre arbitre] for which we can be praised or blamed with reason” (PS III.152, AT 11:445). Indeed, the claim in the Passions is that our control over our free actions “renders us in some manner similar to God in making us masters of ourselves” (11:445). Generosity is able to arise in someone not only when he knows that he can be praised or blamed only for using our freedom well or poorly, but also when he feels in himself “a firm and constant resolution to use it well, by undertaking and executing all that he judges to be best” (III.153, AT 11:446).62 This passion in turn strengthens virtuous habits that lead to the proper use of the will (III.161, AT 11:453–54). In this way, generosity provides the means of overcoming the inclination to depend on our current passions for judgments concerning good and evil. According to the Passions, then, an attachment to clear and distinct ideas is not a simple matter of having an actual perception of them. Rather, we must have a firm and constant resolution to seek them out and to act in accord with them. And this resolution is made possible by our recognition of the primary good of using our free will well. Here, then, the search for truth is subordinated to the pursuit of the good.

61. Cf. the discussion in Shapiro 1999a of Descartes’s account of generosity. 62. Descartes says that the passion “consists” (consiste) in these two components, but given his view that passions in the strict sense are feelings that are referred to the soul and are caused, maintained, and strengthened by the motion of the animal spirits, it seems that the passion could consist only in the positive feelings associated with the recognition of a resolution to use the will well.

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Moreover, Descartes’s view in the Passions is Suárezian in emphasizing that our adherence to our best intellectual judgment itself depends on decisions that are under the control of our will. In terms, again, of the view in the Jesuit letter, whereas morally speaking it is impossible for us to resist a clearly cognized good given our resolution to use free will in the best manner, absolutely we are able to turn away from such a good, since we are free to withdraw the resolution. In contrast to the suggestion in the Jesuit letter, the primary case of such a withdrawal occurs not when we exercise our perverse power of doing the worse while seeing the better, but when we fail to stand up to our current passions in deciding how to act. Descartes held consistently to certain tenets in his mature discussions of human freedom in the period bounded by Fourth Meditation (1641), on one end, and the Passions (1649), on the other. For instance, he indicates throughout that we make the best use of our freedom in adhering to clear and distinct ideas. Moreover, from start to finish he suggests that whenever we consider confused or obscure ideas, there is an indifference that allows us to refrain from judgment. It is important, however, not to overlook the very real development of Descartes’s views that occurs over this period of time. In the Fourth Meditation, he insists that human freedom is perfected in the case where the clarity of knowledge precludes any sort of indifference. Starting with the Principles, however, he begins to link our freedom to a kind of merit that requires an undetermined control over decision. The link is only strengthened in the Mesland and Jesuit letters, where he emphasizes the ability of our will to consider goods other than those revealed by clear and distinct ideas. Admittedly, these letters were written to Jesuit correspondents, and the Principles was modeled on texts used in the Jesuit schools. It might be thought, then, that Descartes was merely playing to the Jesuit crowd in drawing attention to the importance for our free action of a kind of indifference.63 However, his final word is in the Passions, and this text was not directed to a Jesuit audience. There we find not the view in the Fourth Meditation that we are most free when least indifferent, but rather the claim that the proper use of our freedom requires a resolution to resist the ever-present temptation to follow our current passions in making judgments about good and evil. The earlier focus on the freedom of a disembodied mind is therefore replaced with a consideration of the more complex case of the freedom of an embodied soul, and with this shift there is a recognition of the fact that our free assent to the truth is dependent on our exercising proper control over our will in the pursuit of the good. Though Descartes began in the Meditations with an account of free will that has some decidedly anti-Suárezian elements, he ended with an account in the Passions that perhaps would not have seemed so strange to Suárez.

5.3. HUMAN FREEDOM AND DIVINE PROVIDENCE I have noted at several points the pessimistic conclusion in the Principles that we confront insuperable difficulties in attempting to reconcile our undetermined “freedom

63. As suggested, for instance, in Gilson 1913b.

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and indifference” with the power by which God not only knew but also willed and preordained all that “is or can be” (PP I.40–41, AT 8-1:20). In correspondence with Elisabeth soon after the publication of this text, however, Descartes seems to be more optimistic that we can find a way around these difficulties. Thus, he tells Elisabeth that “the independence that we experience and sense [experimentons et . . . sentons] in ourselves and that suffices to render our actions praiseworthy or blameworthy, is not incompatible with a dependence that is of another nature, according to which all things are subject to God” (3 Nov. 1645, AT 4:332–33). As in the case of the Principles, there is a stress here on a freedom that involves independence and that makes us worthy of merit. However, the view in this earlier text seems to differ from the position Descartes offers to Elisabeth insofar as it lacks the proposal that we can reconcile our freedom with the complete dependence of creatures on God once we recognize the different levels at which our will and divine power operate. Nevertheless, I believe that a closer reading of Descartes’s remarks to Elisabeth reveals that the differences with the views in the Principles are not as great as they initially appear. In particular, the discussion in the Elisabeth correspondence allows for a fundamental mystery concerning God’s determination of our free action. This mystery involves not only the problem—familiar from the Molinist account of middle knowledge—of comprehending how God can foreknow with certainty actions that are themselves undetermined. In addition, there is the problem—deriving from Descartes’s created truth doctrine—of comprehending how God can be the efficient cause that produces the truths that provide the foundation for this sort of foreknowledge. My ultimate conclusion is that an understanding of the dependence of our free action on God in terms of the divine creation of eternal truths provides support for a conservationist account of God’s production of that action. I therefore take Descartes to deviate from the sort of concurrentist treatment of human freedom that we find in Suárez. However, I also claim that once God’s creation of truths concerning our free action is posited, the remaining mystery in Descartes concerning God’s providential control over such action is just the one that Suárez admitted in response to his Dominican critics.

5.3.1. The Elisabeth Correspondence In July 1645, Descartes proposed to Princess Elisabeth that they read together Seneca’s On the Happy Life (De Vita Beata) to reflect on the position that we acquire happiness not from fortune but only from ourselves (21 July 1645, AT 4:252–53). Based on their subsequent discussion of this text, Descartes claimed that once we recognize that “there is a God on whom all things depend, whose perfections are infinite, whose power is immense and whose decrees are infallible,” we will be able “to accept calmly all the things that happen to us as expressly sent by God” (15 Sept. 1645, AT 4:291). But Elisabeth was not persuaded, arguing in response that though this recognition can perhaps lead us to accept what follows from “the ordinary course of nature,” it cannot help us with regard to “those humans impose on us, the decision of whom appears to be entirely free.” She concluded that it is faith alone that can teach us that “God takes care to rule volitions, and that he has determined the fortune of each person before the creation of the world” (30 Sept. 1645, AT 4:302*).

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In response, Descartes insists that not only faith but also the reasons that prove “that God exists and is the first and immutable cause of all the effects that do not depend on human free will” reveal equally that “he is also the cause of all the effects that do so depend.” For natural reason reveals that God must exist as a supremely perfect being, and “he would not be supremely perfect if anything could happen in the world without coming entirely from him [entirement de lui].” He anticipates the objection that God does not determine particular effects, since he is merely a “universal cause” of such effects, but urges that the distinction of the Schools between universal and particular causes is out of place here: because what makes the sun, for example, the cause of flowers is not the cause of the fact that tulips differ from roses, [since] their production depends also on other particular causes to which they are not subordinated; but God is such a universal cause of all that he is in the same way the total cause. (6 Oct. 1645, AT 4:314)

In an earlier discussion of this passage, I read the claim that God is a universal and total cause of all effects as indicating not that there are no other causes of such effects, but merely that there are no such causes that are not subordinated to God’s universal causality (see §2.2.1). Given this reading, the conclusion that God is a universal and total cause of our free action does not indicate that our will is not an efficient cause of such action. What it indicates is that our causation of our own free action must be subordinated to God’s universal causation of everything in the created world. Even so, some commentators have concluded on the basis of the remarks to Elisabeth that Descartes allowed that God determines even our free actions.64 Yet such a determination would seem to be incompatible with the claim in the Principles that such actions are “undetermined.” Elisabeth recognized the difficulty here when she responded to the letter containing the assertion that God is the universal and total cause of our free action by protesting that “it seems to me to be contrary to common sense to believe in [free will] depending on God in its action, as it is depending on him in its being” (28 Oct. 1646, AT 4:323*). Descartes answered, in a passage quoted previously, that the independence that renders our free action meritorious is “of quite another kind” than the dependence whereby all created things are subject to God (3 Nov. 1645, AT 4:333). In a subsequent letter, he attempts to illustrate the consistency of the independence of our free actions with their dependence on God in terms of a story about a king who causes a free violation of his prohibition of dueling. The king causes this violation by ordering two individuals to meet who he “knows with certainty” would duel if they met. But this action of the king “does not prevent their fighting when they meet from being as voluntary and as free as if they met on some

64. See, for instance, Gorham’s claim that in his correspondence with Elisabeth, Descartes “implies that our free actions are determined by God” (Gorham 2004, 416), and Chappell’s claim that this correspondence indicates that God is “responsible for every volition by concurring in all actions of mind” (Chappell 1994, 184).

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other occasion and he had known nothing about it.” Likewise, according to Descartes, God knew exactly all the inclinations [inclinations] of our will; it is he himself who has given them to us, it is also he who has disposed all other things external to us such that such and such objects present themselves to our senses at such and such times, on the occasion of which he has known that our free decision would determine us to such and such a thing; and he has willed it such, but he has not willed that it be constrained to that [thing]. (Jan. 1646, AT 4:353–54)

We seem to have here the Molinist position that God causes our free action merely by producing a will that he knew would freely yield a certain action in certain circumstances. Contrary to the remarks in the Principles, this sort of dependence on divine knowledge seems to be perfectly compatible with the claim that the actions themselves are undetermined.65 But though a Molinist reading appears to be warranted by the emphasis in Descartes’s letter on divine knowledge of our inclinations,66 such a reading cannot reflect his most considered position. For as I have indicated, Descartes’s created truth doctrine requires, contrary to the Molinist view in Suárez, that God has created even truths concerning the actions that derive from our free will (see §5.1.1 (ii)). In the Treatise on Divine Grace, as we know, Suárez explained divine knowledge of free human action by appealing to the presence in God of an uncreated idea of the habituo in us that would yield certain free actions in particular circumstances. Despite the fact that this habituo seems to be similar to the inclinations that Descartes took to be involved in God’s knowledge of our free action, Descartes cannot hold that an uncreated idea provides the foundation for this knowledge. The created truth doctrine in fact commits him to the position that God is the efficient cause of whatever it is that allows him to know that certain actions follow from the inclinations of our will. Once we read the Elisabeth correspondence in light of the created truth doctrine, then, we can see that there is still something fundamentally mysterious there concerning the dependence of our free action on God. God must not only know which actions follow from the inclinations in certain circumstances and produce a will with those inclinations in those circumstances; in addition, he must be the efficient cause of the truth that a will with those inclinations would produce such actions in those circumstances. We can no more comprehend how God could cause this sort of conditional truth than we can comprehend how God can bring it about that certain eternal truths derive necessarily from the essence of a triangle. And just as Descartes

65. At least insofar as we can make sense of infallible knowledge of undetermined action. As I indicate below, the mystery of how such knowledge is possible is no more eliminated by Descartes than it was by Suárez. However, this mystery does not presuppose a divine determination of free action. 66. As I assumed in an earlier consideration of this letter in Schmaltz 1994, 17–19. I owe my appreciation of the inadequacy of the Molinist reading to the discussion in Ragland 2005, 178–86.

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emphasized that the power by which God has created the eternal truths exceeds our comprehension, so he could say the same about the power by which he determined conditional truths concerning our free will. In contrast to the case of the eternal truths, however, what renders the divine power incomprehensible in the case of our free action is the fact that it leaves such action undetermined. There is no similar problem of comprehension on the Dominican view that God renders determinate truths concerning free action that natural causes leave indeterminate. Moreover, there is a sense in which Descartes’s created truth doctrine leaves fundamental features of the Jesuit theory of middle knowledge intact. From a Dominican perspective, what is particularly troubling about Suárez’s version of this theory is that God could know with certainty that a habituo in us would result in certain free actions even though those actions do not follow from the nature of that feature. But then what would be equally problematic from that perspective is Descartes’s suggestion to Elisabeth that God could know that certain actions derive from the inclinations of our will even though such inclinations leave our action undetermined. The mystery here is of the same sort whether the idea that is the source of divine knowledge is uncreated, as in Suárez, or rather derives from God’s will, as in Descartes. For the mystery concerns not the ultimate source of the object of God’s knowledge of how we would freely act, but rather the manner in which such an object could allow for infallible knowledge of something that is itself undetermined. Despite siding with the Dominicans in holding that divine causality is involved in fixing the truth of future contingent propositions concerning our free action, then, Descartes remains on the side of the Suárez and the Jesuits in embracing the view that God leaves such action in its undetermined state.

5.3.2. Created Truth and Conservationism I have noted the reference in the discussion of human freedom in the Principles to God’s power over all that “is or can be.” Descartes’s account of the divine creation of eternal truths concerning what “can be” in fact broaches difficulties that are analogous to the difficulties that confront his view of the dependence of our free actions on God. In both cases, the central problem concerns the fact that the nature of the effect appears to preclude the sort of dependence on divine power that Descartes posited. Thus, the result of the created truth doctrine that eternal truths derive from God’s indifferent will seems to be in tension with the conclusion that these truths are themselves necessary. There is the claim in Frankfurt that Descartes denies the necessity of the eternal truths (see §5.1.2), but this claim is belied by Descartes’s own insistence on the fact that “it is because [God] wills the three angles of a triangle to be necessarily [necessario] equal to two right angles that this is now true and could not be otherwise [fieri aliter non potest]” (Sixth Replies, AT 7:432).67 Nevertheless, the implication in Descartes that God is not necessitated in creating the eternal truths seems to support Frankfurt’s claim that such truths ultimately are contingent.

67. See also the reference in the Mesland letter to the fact that there are “things that God could have rendered possible, but that he nonetheless willed to render impossible” (AT 4:118).

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In the case of our free action, there is an analogous problem concerning the compatibility of the claim that our free actions are undetermined with the conclusion that they derive “entirely” from God as their “efficient and total cause.” 68 God’s determination of our actions is supposed to involve his determination of truths concerning how we would freely act in certain circumstances. According to the Principles, however, these free actions are by their nature undetermined. Just as the fact that eternal truths are necessary seems to show that they cannot derive from a divine will that is not itself necessitated, so the fact that our free actions are undetermined seems to show that truths concerning them cannot be determined by God. There is a solution in Descartes to the problem concerning created eternal truths that turns on the fact that such truths derive necessarily from something else that God has freely created, and thus that is not itself necessary.69 Descartes claims in the Fifth Meditation, for instance, that eternal truths concerning a triangle follow from the “determinate nature, or essence, or form of a triangle that is immutable and eternal, and not invented by me or dependent on my mind” (AT 7:64). He even notes in this text that this truth can no more be separated from this essence than existence can be separated from the divine essence (AT 7:66). Certainly this is a striking claim given the position in Descartes that the derivation of God’s existence from his essence is independent of the divine will. But he could still hold that the case of this derivation differs from the case of the derivation of truths concerning triangles insofar as the essence of triangularity, in contrast to the divine essence, has an efficient cause. Thus God could create truths concerning triangles that are necessary by creating an essence that it was in his power not to create, and thus is not itself necessary, but that is nonetheless such that these truths follow from it necessarily.70 There is an analogous solution to the problem of the divine determination of truths concerning our free action. The suggestion I find in the Elisabeth correspondence is

68. See the similar connection between these two problems in Della Rocca forthcoming. Whereas Della Rocca holds that Descartes sets both problems aside by appealing the divine incomprehensibility, though, I find in Descartes’s post-Principles comments, at least, the suggestion that there is more to say in the case of our free action. 69. In his account of the modal status of Descartes’s eternal truths, Curley has emphasized the claim in the Mesland letter that “even if God willed certain truths are necessary, that is not to say that he has willed them necessarily; for to will that they be necessary is something entirely different than willing them necessarily or being necessitated to will them” (AT 4:118). According to Curley, the suggestion here is that the truths are necessary but not necessarily necessary (Curley 1984, 581–83). In terms of this account, we could take eternal truths that are contingently necessary to be those that derive immediately from essences that are themselves contingent, and eternal truths that are necessarily necessary to derive immediately from the one essence that is itself necessary, namely, the divine essence. 70. My suggestion that Descartes distinguished between the created essence and the truths that necessarily and immutably derive from it may seem to conflict with his remark in the 1630 Mersenne correspondence that the essence that God creates “is nothing other than [n’est autre chose que] the eternal truths” (27 May 1630, AT 1:152). It may be that the later remarks in the Fifth Meditation require a distinction between essences and the truths deriving from them that is not fully present in this 1630 correspondence.

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DESCARTES ON CAUSATION Non-necessary divine creation of

Divine determination of

immutable essences

inclinations of will

ground

ground

necessary eternal truths

truths concerning undetermined free action

FIGURE 5.3 Eternal Truths and Free Action

that God determines such truths by making it the case that the relevant actions follow in a nondeterministic manner from the inclinations of our will. Having determined this sort of connection between the inclinations and the action, God is then in a position to know with certainty which volitions we would freely choose in certain circumstances, even though our will is not determined to choose in this manner. Just as God’s nonnecessitated action can produce necessary truths through the mediation of essences, so his determination can result in truths concerning something that is itself undetermined through the mediation of inclinations (see figure 5.3). There is, however, one important respect in which Descartes’s account of the eternal truths differs from his account of free human action. Though he makes clear that God is the efficient cause of created eternal truths, Descartes mentions only creation when characterizing the production of such truths, and not conservation or concurrence.71 In contrast, he uses concurrentist language in discussing God’s causal contribution to our free action. Most notably, he comments in the Fourth Meditation that I must not complain that God concurs [concurrat] with me in choosing [eliciendos] those voluntary acts, or those judgments, in which I err; for these acts are all true and good, insofar as they depend on God, and it is in some manner more perfect that I could choose them, than if I could not. (AT 7:60)

For Suárez, the claim that God concurs in our free decision indicates that he not only conserves us in existence as we act, but also produces our decision by means of a “per se and immediate concursus” that is identical to the action by which we produce it (see §1.2.3 (ii)).72 So the question that confronts us now is whether Descartes intended to provide room for a similar sort of additional divine concursus in the case of our free action. I argued in chapter 3 that given Descartes’s emphasis on the constancy of the immediate effects of God’s “ordinary concursus” to body–body interactions, we

71. The 1630 correspondence on the created truth doctrine includes the claim that God “from all eternity willed and understood them to be, and by that fact he created them” (To Mersenne, 27 May 1630, AT 1:152). If we take creation “from eternity” to preclude any sort of temporality, then there would be no room for continued conservation or concurrence, both of which presuppose temporal effects. 72. In addition, as we know, Suárez holds that in the case of free action, God offers a concursus with refraining from making a choice or with deciding differently.

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must conceive of this concursus in a conservationist manner. So also, I claimed in chapter 4 that God’s causal contribution to mind–body interaction consists not in his immediate production of the mental and bodily effects of that interaction, but rather in his creation and conservation of the natures that make such interaction possible. This line of argument suggests that we should accept a conservationist account of the way in which Descartes thinks God has “willed and preordained” our free action. Moreover, the story of the duelers that Descartes provides in the Elisabeth correspondence seems to support this sort of account. For the dueling is dependent on the king not in the sense that he directly causes it, but in the sense that he indirectly produces it by giving an order that he infallibly knew would result in the decision to duel that involves an indeterministic sort of freedom. So also, free action is not said to depend on God in the sense that he produces the same action that free agents produce. Instead, Descartes’s claim is that God wills that such agents have an inclination that leads them to a certain action even though they are not “constrained to” that action in the sense of being determined to produce it. We know that given the created truth doctrine, this sort of willing must involve more than God’s producing inclinations and circumstances that he prevolitionally knows will result in certain undetermined free actions in those circumstances. For God must also be the efficient cause of the conditional truth that the inclinations would yield the actions in those circumstances. Having created these truths, however, there is nothing that God needs to do to produce the free actions beyond creating and conserving a world in which agents with the relevant inclinations exist in the appropriate circumstances. Certain remarks from writings Descartes produced toward the end of his life reinforce the impression that he did not take God to directly produce our free action. There is, for instance, Descartes’s claim in a 1647 letter to Queen Christina of Sweden that “free decision [libre arbitre] is in itself the noblest thing that can be in us, and that renders us in a certain manner [en quelque façon] equal to him and seems to exempt us from being his subjects” (20 Nov. 1647, AT 5:85). The need for the qualification that our will makes us only “in a certain manner” like God and that it only “seems” to exempt us from being his subjects is evident given the created truth doctrine. For this doctrine requires not only that the divine will have a sort of indifference that is impossible for us, but also that God determine all that “is or can be” concerning even our free action. Nevertheless, insofar as it is in our control to choose how we freely act, our free action is comparable to the acts that derive from God’s supremely indifferent will. And insofar as what God creates does not itself determine truths concerning our free action, we are distinct from subjects that God determines simply by creating and conserving with their natures in certain circumstances. We therefore retain in this late letter the position from Descartes’s early notebook that “free decision” is one of the most distinctive of the “miracles” that God has produced. Finally, there is Descartes’s claim in the 1649 Passions—quoted previously—that reflection on divine providence leads us to consider “everything that affects us to occur of necessity and as it were by fate [comme fatale],” with the notable exception of matters that God “has willed to depend on our free decision” (PS II.146, AT 11:439). As in the letter to Christina, so here there is an emphasis on the fact that our free decision “renders us in some manner similar to God in making us masters of

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ourselves” (III.152, AT 11:445). The suggestion in the Passions is that God allows us to be masters of ourselves by leaving it to our will to determine its free actions. In light of the remarks to Elisabeth, we can take the more complete position here to be that God creates and conserves our will with inclinations that allow God to know with certainty how we would act in certain circumstances but that leave our will undetermined with respect to such action. We still have something similar to the mystery, deriving from Suárez, of how God could know our free action on the basis of his idea of a habituo of our will that does not determine this action. Yet Descartes’s talk of a divine decree that dictates that our free action depend on our will alone reveals how far he is from the view in Suárez that God produces this action by means of a concursus that is identical to the action itself.

Conclusion

According to a standard narrative concerning the history of philosophy, Descartes’s theory of causation marks a sharp break from past conceptions of causality. In particular, this story has it that Descartes set out on a new path by replacing the four Aristotelian causes prominent in scholastic natural philosophy with the efficient causes required for his new mechanistic physics. There is admittedly a residue of scholasticism, for instance, in his claim in the Third Meditation that a cause must contain its effect formally or eminently. However, such a claim can and has been understood to reflect a merely superficial connection to past thought. For those who take Descartes to herald the advent of modernity, what is novel in his theory of causation is more significant than what is borrowed. There can be no doubt that this theory involves a significant break with the scholastic past. Having rejected material forms and qualities distinct from extension and its modes, for instance, Descartes simply could not speak in the way the scholastics did of the containment of “forms” in bodily causes either actually or “virtually” in the more noble power to produce those forms. Moreover, it is certainly important that in one fell swoop, he eliminated from his physics the sort of final causality that scholastics such as Suárez took to derive from God’s concursus with natural causes. The displacement of final causes in Descartes is nowhere more dramatic than in his claim that God has no ends when he acts as an efficient cause in creating eternal truths. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that the emphasis in Descartes on efficient causality did not emerge from history ex nihilo, but was anticipated in a scholastic reconceptualization of causation that culminated in the work of Suárez. We also need to remember that there were issues in scholasticism concerning efficient causation that Descartes’s new ontology did not eliminate entirely. There is, for instance, the scholastic problem of explaining the bodily production of changes in an incorporeal intellect. To be sure, the immaterial mind that Descartes posited was a 217

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res cogitans with sensations and feelings rather than, as on the standard scholastic view, a purely intellectual substance. Moreover, his paradigmatic case of the action of body on mind is the production in the mind of sensory states rather than, as in the scholastics, the production in the intellect of intelligible species. Even so, Descartes retained from scholasticism both the sense that the immaterial is more noble than the material, and the axiom that what is less noble cannot suffice to produce a change in what is more noble. He thereby also inherited the difficulty of explaining the causal contribution of something that is material to changes in something immaterial. At least some causal aspects of the “mind–body problem” in Descartes were not new, then, but merely recycled versions of problems that previous thinkers confronted. What I take to reveal most clearly the significance of Descartes’s connections to scholastic accounts of causality, however, is his emphasis on the foundational role for his physics of the claim that God conserves the same quantity of motion in the material world by means of his “ordinary concursus.” I have argued that such a claim provides the primary clue for discerning fundamental elements of Descartes’s theory of causation. Though the claim itself may seem to draw on a traditional scholastic concurrentism, a more careful consideration of its scholastic context serves to reveal its radical implication that God’s contribution to the natural causal order of the material world is exhausted by his creation and continued conservation of that world. In contrast to the view in scholastics such as Suárez that divine concursus is identical to the actions by which secondary causes produce particular changes, Descartes indicated that this concursus produces an effect that is constant and thus distinct from the changes that are attributable only to secondary causes. There is a sort of causal division of labor that is closer to the conservationist views of Durandus than to anything in the work of the scholastic concurrentists. Of course, neither Durandus nor his concurrentist opponents confronted the problem in Descartes of explaining how a mere res extensa could be an efficient cause. But though some have thought that this problem led Descartes to give up on genuine bodily causes and to embrace a kind of occasionalism, the texts seem to me to indicate otherwise. In the case of body–body interaction, I have found an explanation of the “forces for acting” in Descartes’s physics in terms of special features of the duration of moving bodies. Such forces are supposed to allow the moving bodies to be (total or adequate) causes of particular changes that leave intact the total quantity of motion that God continually conserves as universal and primary cause. In contrast, it is not bodily duration that matters most in the case of body-to-mind action, but rather the special nature of the human mind. Descartes’s most considered position is that this nature is such that certain bodily motions are able to affect this mind as (partial) efficient causes of its sensations. What is missing from Descartes, however, is any appeal to the immediate activity of God in the production of sensation. Though the absence of such an appeal would be surprising on an occasionalist or even a concurrentist reading of his theory of causation, it is to be expected on the conservationist reading that informs this study. The problem of attributing causal power to a merely extended thing of course provides no barrier to the claim in Descartes that finite minds are real causes. Moreover, his acceptance of the scholastic axiom that the effect cannot be more perfect than its cause does not produce the sort of difficulty for mind-to-body action that it produces

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for body-to-mind action. Nevertheless, Descartes’s insistence on the immateriality of mind does broach the scholastic problem of explaining how something that is incorporeal can be “present” to something that is corporeal in order to act on it. Descartes could have simply dismissed this problem, as Durandus did, by claiming that a cause need not be present at a place in order to act there. It is surely significant that he did not take this route, but instead appealed to the fact that an immaterial mind has an “extension of power” in virtue of which it is present where it acts. The suggestion in Descartes that the mind is the cause of its free volitions broaches different issues from scholasticism. There is in the background the Jesuit view in Suárez that the will that produces such volitions must have the power to do otherwise. Descartes started from a position that was not entirely friendly to such a view when he emphasized in the Fourth Meditation that we are most free when our acts follow necessarily from the orientation of our will toward the true (and good). However, he was increasingly drawn to the view that our freedom requires the mastery of our will over its action, particularly with respect to pursuit of the good. He persisted in his commitment to the presence of this sort of mastery even while holding that God is not only the “universal and total cause” of our free action, but also the indifferent cause of truths concerning that action. Yet though these claims regarding God’s causal contribution to our free action in some respects go beyond anything in Suárez, they stop short of Suárez’s concurrentist conclusion that God concurs with our will as the immediate efficient cause of such action. On the conservationist view suggested in Descartes, God merely leaves it to us to determine how our will freely determines our own volitions. I have been concerned, then, to argue that a conservationist framework provides a means both of deciphering and of interrelating Descartes’s discussions of various forms of causal interaction. However, I also have indicated that this framework allows us to appreciate certain problems internal to his system. I have mentioned two particular problems, the first of which concerns body–body interaction, and the second mind-to-body action. The first problem is connected to the objection, prominent even among early modern sympathizers, that Descartes’s physics fails to provide a satisfactory account of the “force for resisting” that bodies at rest exhibit in collision. A conservationist understanding of this physics reveals that this force is problematic precisely because it cannot be a constant result of God’s ordinary concursus. Rather, the force for resisting involves a momentary impulse that God would have to create by means of an act distinct from the continuation of his original act of creating the material world. This is one act too many given Descartes’s own view that particular changes in matter derive from secondary causes rather than from God as primary cause. The second problem for Descartes is connected to the objection, prominent in Leibniz, that the admission that finite minds can produce new motion in the world conflicts with the principle in Cartesian physics that requires the conservation of the total quantity of motion. I have argued that Leibniz was wrong to suggest that Descartes himself was led by this difficulty to conclude that finite minds are limited to acting on body by changing the direction of its motions. Nevertheless, there is a clear philosophical motivation for this conclusion given Descartes’s understanding of God’s ordinary concursus in terms of his conservation of the quantity of matter

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and motion he originally created. Just as this concursus cannot explain the additional impulses required by the force for resisting, so it cannot explain the conservation of any quantity of motion that other minds add to the world subsequent to creation. It might be thought that these problems with the force for resisting and the introduction of new motion provide reason to question my conservationist interpretation of Descartes. However, the problems derive directly from his own insistence that God’s action as primary cause consists merely in the continuation of his original act of creating the world. Far from leading to occasionalism, such an insistence shifts the burden for explaining particular changes in nature from God to secondary causes. There is no similar shift in scholastic concurrentism, which requires immediate divine involvement in all causal operations. Nevertheless, we cannot understand this shift adequately, or perhaps even recognize it in the first place, if we fail to take seriously the scholastic context of Descartes’s theory of causation.

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Index

action body-to-mind account of, in Comments, 149–160, 162 (see also mind, innate sensory faculty of) scholastic problem with, 145–149 See also motion, as sign for sensation; sensation definition of, in Suárez, 31–32 at a distance, 96, 108, 112, 143 n.31, 164, 165, 166, 170–171 free vs. coerced action, 182, 194–195 and generosity, 207–208 God’s concursus with, 42–44, 178, 184, 214 vs. voluntary, 35 n.66, 64 n.37, 182, 195 See also freedom, human; volition; will immanent, 32–33, 34, 42, 107, 155 n.55 mind-to-body change of direction account of, 131, 172–173, 175–177 and conservation of motion, 99 n.33, 171–177, 219–220 scholastic problem with, 163–167 See also union, of mind and body, and mind-body interaction in patient, 19, 31 transeunt, 32–33, 36 See also causation; cause; force Adam, Charles, 202

Adam of Wodenham, 92 n.7 Alanen, Lilli, 161–162 Albert of Saxony, 92 n.7 Alquié, Ferdinand, 203–204 angels, 15, 16, 32 n.59, 107 n.54, 131, 134, 141, 142–143, 164–167, 169, 174 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas Aristotle, 4, 20, 29, 30–31, 35, 60, 80 n.85, 94, 110 n.59, 129, 140, 145, 146, 167 n.79 (see also categories, Aristotelian; motion, Aristotelian concept of; will, Aristotelian concept of) Arnauld, Antoine, 59–60, 140–141, 193 As‘ar¯ı, Ab¯u l’Hasan al-, 12 attribute. See mode, vs. attribute Augustine of Hippo, 75 n.71, 145 Aureoli, Peter, 92 n.7 Averroes (Ab¯u’l-Walid ibn Rushd), 15 Avincenna (Ab¯u Ali al-Husayn ibn S¯ın¯a ), 14, 33 axiom conservation, 49–51, 71–84, 85–86 (see also conservation) containment, 7, 49–71, 84–85, 112–115, 128, 130, 148–149, 153–157, 190–191 (see also containment) vs. principle, 49 n.1 voluntarist, 25, 26, 180 Baker, Gordon, 135 n.11, 159 n.61 Bañez, Domingo, 184, 191

231

232

INDEX

B¯a quillan¯ı, Ab¯u Bakr al-, 13 n.13 Beeckman, Isaac, 110 n.59 Bellarmine, Robert, 184 Bennett, Jonathan, 50, 51, 82–83, 84, 112 n.64, 188–89 Beyssade, Michelle, 204 n.57 Blackwell, Richard, 89 n.5 body argument for existence of, 55–56, 66, 116, 151–152 Descartes vs. scholastics on, 11–12, 44–47, 87, 122, 129, 217 (see also quality, real, Descartes vs. scholastics on) divisibility of, 78–81, 91–92, 107 indefinite extension of, 70 n.57 particular, mode vs. substance, 53 n.9, 68 n.53, 78, 80–81 See also extension, as essence of body; intellect, more noble than body; mind, more noble than body Broughton, Janet, 112–114, 153–157 Buridan, John, 94–95 Burman, Frans, 57–58 Cajetan (Tommasio de Vio), 25 n.35, 31 n.57, 147 n.38, 180 n.4 Campbell, Joseph, 197 n.39 Carraud, Vincent, 3, 60 n.26, 74 n.68 Cartesian interaction. See interaction, Cartesian, scandal of categories, Aristotelian, 25–26, 46, 116 Caterus, Johannes (Johan de Kater), 59, 65 causation occasional, 9–10, 145, 130–131, 157–161 (see also occasionalism) orders of, 17, 22, 40–42, 76, 85–86 universal vs. particular, 20–21, 57 n.17, 76–77, 85–86, 90–91, 123, 210–211 See also action; cause; overdetermination, causal cause adequate/total, 56–58, 76–77, 85–86, 114, 148–149, 153 definition of, in Suárez, 29 efficient, 4, 30–33, 56–61, 162 definition of, in Suárez, 30–31 priority of, 4, 11, 29–36, 59–64 See also God, as efficient cause exemplary, 24 n.31 extrinsic, 29, 33, 113 final, 4, 33–36, 61–64, 158–159 and God, 36, 44, 61–64 and intellectual agents, 34–35, 64 metaphorical motion of, 29, 34, 36, 64 and natural agents, 35–36, 62–63

See also intellect, as final cause of will; union, of mind and body, and teleology formal, 4, 30, 45, 59–61, 158–159, 189 (see also form) immediate, 20–21, 39 instrumental, 17, 19, 21, 40–41, 43, 146–147, 154 intrinsic, 29, 30, 61 material, 4, 30 modal vs. substantial, 103–104 necessary, 42–43 partial, 56–57, 154 primary, 20, 40, 89–105 principal, 17, 40, 42, 45, 90 remote, 39, 151 secondary, 17, 20–23, 39, 40, 42, 105–124 secundum esse/secundum fieri, 18, 23, 33, 38–39, 73–75, 76–77, 81, 83–84, 86, 104, 117–118, 121 as simultaneous with its effect, 74–75, 81, 112 and reason, 36, 74, 189–190 See also action; causation; freedom, human; overdetermination, causal; force Clarke, Desmond, 112 n.62, 122 n.82 Clatterbaugh, Kenneth, 68 n.50 Clauberg, Johann, 5 n.6, 171 n.85, 173 Clement VIII, 184 Clerselier, Claude, 5 n.6, 172–173, 202 n.53 Cohen, I. B., 107–108 collision, rules for, in Descartes, 89 n.5, 98–99, 114–115 compatibilism, casual, in Thomas Aquinas, 11, 16–19, 165 n.70 concurrentism, 6, 7, 16–19, 40–44, 84–85, 86, 100–102, 125–127, 209, 218, 219, 220 (see also concursus, ordinary) concursus, ordinary, 8, 92, 93, 99–105, 122–124 , 128, 171–172, 175–176, 214–215, 219–220 (See also conservation, and concursus; freedom, human, God’s concursus with; God, power of, absolute vs. ordinary) Condemnation of 1277, 25, 180 Congregation on Grace, 184 conservation, 18–19, 73–77 and concursus, 40–44, 99–105, 127–128 not distinct from creation, 22, 38–39, 81–84, 125–126, 178 See also action, mind-to-body, and conservation of motion; axiom, conservation; quantity, conserved conservationism, mere critique of, in Suárez, 22–23, 41–42

Index

233

in Descartes, 6, 8, 23–24, 41, 85–86, 125–128, 160, 175–177, 212–216, 220 in Durandus, 19–24, 86, 89 containment eminent, 3, 4, 58, 67–71, 113, 148–149, 166–167, 190–191 formal, 3, 4, 55, 64–67, 84, 114–115, 149, 153–155 (see also reality, formal) See also axiom, containment Cordemoy, Geraud de, 5 n.6, 171 n.85 Cottingham, John, 117 n.75, 138 n.21 created truth. See truth, created creation, 17–19, 36–39 ab aeterno, 37, 38, 74 de novo, 37, 38, 45, 75 ex nihilo, 18, 19, 36–39, 58, 76, 82–83, 90, 125–126 See also conservation, not distinct from creation; truth, created Curley, Edwin, 213 n.69

Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia, 3, 130, 131–135, 144, 167–169, 209–212 Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, 132 esse. See cause, secundum esse/secundum fieri; res eternal truths, creation of. See truth, created extension, as essence of body, 60–61, 71, 87, 88, 91–92, 116, 119, 134, 168, 169, 171, 217 (see also body; God, extension of; mind, extension of; quantity, conserved, of matter)

Dalbriez, Roland, 65 n.42 Della Rocca, Michael, 47 n.88, 213 n.68 Descartes, René. See body, Descartes vs. scholastics on; collision, rules for, in Descartes; heaviness, discussion of, in Descartes; hierarchy, ontological, in Descartes; judgment, Descartes vs. scholastics on; laws, of nature, in Descartes; motion, definition of, in Descartes; occasionalism, and Descartes; quality, real, Descartes vs. scholastics on; soul, Descartes vs. scholastics on; rest, problems with, in Descartes; truth, created, doctrine of, in Descartes; union, of mind and body, argument for, in Descartes Des Chene, Dennis, 105 n.49, 109, 127–128 Desgabets, Robert, 107 n.54 distinction formal, 26–27, 28 n.46 modal, 26–28, 78–79 real, 25–26, 27, 78 in reason, 21, 26, 27, 61, 77, 85, 119 Dominicans, 10–11, 19–20, 179, 184, 191–192 (see also freedom, human, Dominicans vs. Jesuits on; Thomism) Du Hamel, Jean, 107 n.54 Dubarle, Dominique, 97 n.25 Duhem, Pierre, 94 Duns Scotus, John, 26–27, 28 n.46, 31 n.57, 40–41, 42, 165, 182 n.7 (see also Scotism) Durandus of Saint-Pourçain, 11, 17, 19–24, 36, 37–38, 40, 41, 42, 85–86, 126, 147,

Farabi, Ab¯u Nasr Muhammed al-, 14 Fonseca, Peter, 27 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 9–10, 122–123, 130 force in body–body interaction for acting, 95, 97, 111–112, 115–116, 124, 127–128, 218 and duration, 88, 117–121, 122, 218 (see also duration) fictionalist interpretation of, 105, 115–116, 120–121 and God, 102–105, 121–124, 218 impressed vs. inertial, 98–99 ontology of, 104–105, 116–121, 160–161 for resisting, 97–98, 111–112, 115–116, 124, 127–128, 176–177, 219 (see also rest, problems with, in Descartes) in union, 3, 134, 138, 140, 144, 167–168, 174–175 form accidental/substantial, 17, 32, 41, 45, 61 eduction of, 32, 45–46 and matter, 45–46, 92 perfect vs. imperfect, 164 See also quality, real Frankfurt, Harry, 188–189, 212 Freddoso, Alfred, 22 n.27 Frederick V, King of Bohemia, 132 freedom, human account of in Descartes’s correspondence, 200–205 in the Fourth Meditation, 193–199 in the Passions, 205–208

165, 167, 170, 178, 218 (see also conservationism, mere, in Durandus) duration of God, 78 n.80 modes of, 79, 118–120 and substance, 77–78, 119 See also force, in body–body interaction, and duration; time

234

INDEX

freedom, human (continued) in the Principles, 199–200 (see also freedom, human, and divine providence, in the Principles) in the Rules, 192 in Suárez, 180–187 compatibilist view of, 197 n.39, 198 n.43, 204 n.57 (see also freedom, human, incompatibilism of) vs. divine freedom, 190–191, 196, 215 (see also God, indifference of) and divine providence, Domincans vs. Jesuits on, 179, 184–187, 191–192 in the Elisabeth correspondence, 209–212 in the Principles 177, 186–87, 199–200, 208–209 See also action, free, God’s concursus with; middle knowledge exercise vs. specification of, 35 n.66, 42–43, 182–183 incompatibilism of, 179–180, 184, 191, 199–200, 208 (see also freedom, human, compatibilist view of) indifference of, 8, 35, 43, 179, 182, 184, 186, 192–208 (See also God, indifference of) positive faculty of, 202–204 spontaneity of, 196–197 See also action, free; truth, created, and human freedom; volition; will Gabbey, Alan, 83 n.92, 98 n.30, 99 n.32, 117–118, 119 Gabriel Biel, 92 n.7 Galileo Galilei, 110 Garber, Daniel, 6, 88, 98 n.30, 102–105, 115–116, 120–122, 156 n.57, 175–176 Gassendi, Pierre, 62, 73–74, 198 Geulincx, Arnold, 144 Ghaz¯a l¯ı, Ab¯u H¯a mid al-, 14–16, 17 Gilson, Etienne, 65 n.42, 83 n.92 God argument for existence of, 3, 49–50, 51–52, 55–56, 71–72 as causa sui, 59–60, 189 as efficient cause, 36, 44, 187, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217 extension of, 163–164, 165, 169–170 immutability of, 90–91, 93–94, 100, 109, 115 n.74, 116, 121–122, 124, 125–126, 160, 210, 214–15 indifference of, 62, 189–191, 212, 215 (see also freedom, human, vs. divine freedom)

power of, 10, 15, 17–18, 36, 59, 75, 177, 186, 188, 192, 211–212 absolute vs. ordinary, 99 (see also concursus, ordinary) See also cause, final, and God; duration, of God; force, in body–body interaction, and God; freedom, human, God’s concursus with; freedom, human, and divine providence; sensation, and divine goodness; truth, created; will, human, in image of God Gorham, Geoffrey, 70 n.76, 80 n.89, 81 n.90 Gouhier, Henri, 158 n.59 Gueroult, Martial, 50, 51, 53 n.9, 68 n.53, 79–81, 102, 109 n.58, 117 Hatfield, Gary, 105 n.48, 161 n.63, 198 n.43 Hattab, Helen, 115 n.73 heaviness, discussion of, in Descartes, 71, 137, 138, 140, 163, 167–169, 170–171 heterogeneity, problem of, 130, 132, 133, 163 (see also interaction, Cartesian, scandal of) hierarchy, ontological, in Descartes enhanced, 69 simple, 53–54, 68 Hobbes, Thomas, 119 Hoffman, Paul, 206 n.60 Hume, David, 47 Hyperaspistes, 69–70, 73–74 idea. See reality, objective; judgment, concerning clear and distinct perception; sensation, as mode of mind; thought, pure vs. sensory impetus, theory of, 94–95 indifference. See freedom, human, indifference of; God, indifference of intellect agent vs. passive, 32–33 as final cause of will, 64, 183, 197–198, 206 (see also will, relation to intellect) more noble than body, 146, 147, 148 (see also mind, more noble than body) See also species, intelligible; thought, pure vs. sensory intellectualism. See volunatism, ethical, vs. intellectualism interaction, Cartesian, scandal of 5–7, 8, 9 (see also action; heterogeneity, problem of; union, of mind and body, and mind–body interaction) James of Viterbo 146–147 Javellus, Chrysostom 180 n.4

Index Jesuits 25, 26–27, 43, 93–94, 172, 200–205, 219 (see also freedom, human, Dominicans vs. Jesuits on) judgment concerning clear and distinct perception, 193, 194, 195, 198–199, 200, 201–202, 206–208 Descartes vs. scholastics on, 179, 183, 192–195, 197–199, 200–205 concerning truth vs. goodness, 181, 183, 192–194, 205, 207–208 See also intellect, as final cause of will; will, relation to intellect Kenny, Anthony, 202 n.53 Kent, Bonnie, 180 La Forge, Louis de, 5 n.6 La Mare, William de, 181 n.5 laws of nature, in Descartes first, 73, 106–108, 198 n.42 (see also quantum in se est) second, 108–110 third, 110–116, 174–175 (see also collision, rules for, in Descartes) psychophysical 161–162 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 31, 74 n.68, 79 n.84, 163, 172–173, 176–177, 219 light, nature of, 18 n.21, 73 n.66, 108 n.57 Locke, John, 67 n.47 Loeb, Louis, 54–55, 161–162 Lucretius, 107–108 Maier, Anneliese, 94–95 Maimonides. See Moses Maimonides Major, John, 92 n.7 Malebranche, Nicolas, 5, 71 n.62, 93 n.11, 96 n.24, 121, 122–123, 124 n.84, 144 Marion, Jean-Luc, 76 Marmura, Michael, 16 McLaughlin, Peter, 173–177 Menn, Stephen, 25 mere conservationism. See conservationism, mere Mersenne, Marin, 56, 187–188 Mesland, Denis, 200–201, 202 metaphysics, renovation of, in Suárez, 25–28, 31–32, 180 middle knowledge, 179, 185–187, 211 mind extension of, 131, 134, 138, 169–171, 219 immateriality of, 78, 132–133, 135, 146 n.35, 163–164, 219 indivisibility of, 68–69, 78, 107

235

innate sensory faculty of, 150–155, 157–158, 160–162, 177 more noble than body, 68–69, 218 (see also intellect, more noble than body) See also sensation, as mode of mind; soul; thought; union, of mind and body miracles, 14, 99 mode vs. attribute, 54 n.10, 79, 117–18 vs. substance, 28, 44, 68, 71, 76–77 See also body, particular, mode vs. substance; distinction, modal; duration, modes of; quality, real, difference from mode; sensation, as mode of mind Molina, Luis de, 40 n.71, 179, 184–187 More, Henry, 88, 97–98, 103–104, 113–114, 169–171 Morris, Katherine, 135 n.11, 159 n.61 Moses Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon), 12–14, 16–17, 80 motion cinematic view of, 102–103 (see also time, atomistic concept of) definition of, in Descartes, 89 determination of, 109, 111, 119–120, 132 n.7, 172, 174 impulse view of, 103–104 inclination to, 109, 110, 111, 120–121, 123–124 migration theory of, 112–114, 159 rectilinear nature of, 108–111, 120, 123–124 as sign for sensation, 136, 152 n.47, 156–157 speed of, 95, 96 voluntary, 171–177 See also cause, final, metaphorical motion of; collision, rules for, in Descartes; impetus, theory of; laws, of nature, in Descartes; quantity, conserved, of motion Nadler, Steven, 145, 151 n.45, 157–161 Newton, Isaac, 98–99 nominalism, vs. realism, 26, 32, 92 Normore, Calvin, 186 Norris, John, 71 n.62 occasionalism argument against, in scholastics, 16–17, 20, 22–23 and Descartes, 4–5, 9–10, 76–77, 84–86, 121–122, 126, 144, 155–156, 158–161, 220 medieval Islamic, 7, 10, 12–16, 19, 47, 80

236

INDEX

occasionalism (continued) post-Descartes, 16, 92 n.11, 122–123, 144, 172–173 See also causation, occasional Ockham. See William of Ockham Olivio, Gilles, 64 O’Neill, Eileen, 68–71 overdetermination, causal, 20 n.24, 22, 165 Paul V, 184 Perler, Dominic, 11 Pessin, Andrew, 100 n.35, 127 n.88 Peter of Auvergne, 33 n.61 phantasm. See species, intelligible, relation to phantasm Plato, 145, 146, 163 (see also Platonism) Platonism, 14, 140–141, 146–147, 148 Pollot, Alphonse, 132 power, extension of. See mind, extension of Proclus, 52 n.6 providence, divine. See freedom, human, and divine providence quality, real Descartes vs. scholastics on, 28, 35, 44–45, 53 n.8, 61 n.29, 62–63, 71, 105, 113, 116, 122, 167–168, 170–171, 217 difference from mode, 28 See also form, accidental/substantial; heaviness, discussion of, in Descartes quantity, conserved of matter, 91–92 of motion, 93–96, 171–177 (see also action, mind-to-body, and conservation of motion) of rest, 96–99 (see also rest, problems with, in Descartes) quantum in se est, 107–108, 115, 118–119 Quinn, Philip, 41 n.74 Raconis, Charles François d’Abra de, 32 n.58 Radner, Daisie, 53–54, 67 Ragland, C. P., 197 n.39 R¯a z¯ı, Fakhr al’Din al-, 13 realism. See nominalism, vs. realism reality formal, 52, 65–67, 148–149, 154 (see also containment, formal) objective, 52, 65–67, 116–117, 149, 151, 153, 154, 190 (see also sensation, representative nature of) Regis, Pierre-Sylvain, 43 n.77, 104 n.47, 107 n.54, 123 n.83, 127 n.87, 190 n.22 Regius, Henricus, 126, 129, 138 n.20, 149–150 Reid, Jasper, 171 n.87

Remnant, Peter, 175 n.96 res, 25, 27, 37 n.68, 41, 44–46, 77, 107 rest, problems with, in Descartes, 120, 124, 128, 176–177, 219–220 (see also conservation, of rest; force, for resisting) Revius, Jacobus, 101–102, 149 n.43 Richardson, Robert, 130, 140 n.23 Rozemond, Marleen, 145–146, 147 Rudolph, Ulrich, 11 scholasticism, 4, 6–7, 25–28, 30, 44–45, 92, 94, 101–102, 133, 145–149, 163–167, 180, 192, 194, 217–218 (see also action, body-to-mind, scholastic problem with; action, mind-to-body, scholastic problem with; body, Descartes vs. scholastics on; Dominicans; freedom, human, Dominicans vs. Jesuits on; Jesuits; judgment, Descartes vs. scholastics on; occasionalism, argument against, in scholastics; quality, real, Descartes vs. scholastics on; Scotism; soul, Descartes vs. scholastics on; Thomism) Scotism, 11, 27, 65 Scott, David, 152 n.48, 152–153 n.51 Scotus. See Duns Scotus Seneca, 209 sensation as arbitrary, 135–137 confusion of, 138, 140, 143 and divine goodness, 63 n.34 internal vs. external, 141–142 as mode of mind, 148, 155 representative nature of, 66–67, 143 See also action, body-to-mind, account of, in Comments; mind, innate sensory faculty of; motion, as sign for sensation; species, intentional; thought, pure vs. sensory Simmons, Alison, 141–142, 162 n.66 Smith, Norman (Kemp), 5–6, 8, 50, 173–174 Soto, Domingo de, 25, 26 soul Descartes vs. scholastics on, 129, 148, 155, 217–218 weak vs. strong, 206–207 See also mind Specht, Ranier, 158 n.59 species intelligible, 32–33 relation to phantasm, 146–149, 154–155 intentional, 46 Spinoza, Benedict de, 107 n.55

Index Suárez, Francisco, 11–12, 22–47, 49, 50–51, 52, 53, 57, 59, 61, 62–66, 69–71, 74–75, 77, 78, 82–84, 85–86, 87–89, 90, 92, 93, 94–95, 99, 100, 113, 114, 116, 125–126, 147–149, 154, 155–156, 166–167, 178–187, 192, 194–195, 204–205, 211, 214, 218, 219 (see also action, definition of, in Suárez; cause, definition of, in Suárez; cause, efficient, definition of, in Suárez; conservationism, mere, critique of, in Suárez; freedom, human, account of, in Suárez; metaphysics, renovation of, in Suárez) substance. See cause, substantial vs. modal; duration, and substance; form, accidental/substantial; mode, vs. substance; res Tamburini, Michelangelo, 93 Tannery, Paul, 202 teleology. See cause, final; union, of mind and body, and teleology Thomas Aquinas, 10, 16–19, 20–23, 37–39, 40, 41, 43, 73–75, 80, 82, 99, 145–149, 154, 163–167, 181, 182 n.7, 192–193 n.27 (see also compatibilism, causal, in Thomas Aquinas; Thomism) Thomism 25–26, 32, 43, 65, 74–75, 92, 147–148, 180–181 thought as essence of mind, 129 pure vs. sensory, 141–142, 150–151 See also mind; soul time atomistic concept of, 13–15, 47, 79–81, 109 n.58 (see also motion, cinematic view of) and duration, 77 (see also duration) endurantist vs. perdurantist concept of, 80–81 parts of, 78–81, 118 See also cause, as simultaneous with its effect truth, created doctrine of, in Descartes, 187–192, 212–216 and essences, 213–214 and human freedom, 211–216 necessity of, 188, 212–214 vs. truths concerning God, 188–189, 213

237

union, of mind and body argument for, in Descartes, 140–142 in the Elisabeth correspondence, 132–135, 167–169 fact vs. explanation of, 139–140, 142 and mind–body interaction, 131–144, 167–169 ontological status of, 138–139, 155 and teleology, 63–64, 136, 162 (see also sensation and divine goodness) two accounts of, 135–140 See also force, in union; sensation; volition, human, as confused Vasquez, Gabriel, 65 n.43 Voetius, Gisbertius, 126, 138 n.20, 149 n.42 volition human, as confused, 142–144 vs. passion, 177, 205–206 and psychokenesis, 143 See also action, free; freedom, human; motion, voluntary; will voluntarist axiom. See axiom, voluntarist voluntarism, ethical, vs. intellectualism 180–182 Walter of Bruges, 181 n.5 weight. See heaviness, discussion of, in Descartes Westfall, Richard, 117 n.75 will ability to act morally vs. absolutely, 202–203, 204–205, 208 (see also freedom, human, positive faculty of) Aristotelian concept of, 181 first vs. second act of, 33, 34–35 habituo of, 185–186, 192, 211–212, 216 human, in image of God, 190–191, 215–216 relation to intellect, 181–182, 192–208 (see also intellect, as final cause of will) See also action, free; freedom, human; judgment; volition William of Ockham, 26, 65 n.43, 92 n.7 Williams, Bernard, 5, 143 Wilson, Margaret, 3, 135–137, 140 n.23, 141 n.26, 153 n.52