Descartes on Innate Ideas

Descartes on Innate Ideas Continuum Studies in Philosophy Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Mar...

Author: Deborah A. Boyle

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Descartes on Innate Ideas

Continuum Studies in Philosophy Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA Continuum Studies in Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the whole field of philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Aesthetic in Kant, James Kirwan Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion, Aaron Preston Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus, Christopher Brown Augustine and Roman Virtue, Brian Harding The Challenge of Relativism, Patrick Phillips Demands of Taste in Kant’s Aesthetics, Brent Kalar Descartes and the Metaphysics of Human Nature, Justin Skirry Descartes’ Theory of Ideas, David Clemenson Dialectic of Romanticism, Peter Murphy and David Roberts Hegel’s Philosophy of Language, Jim Vernon Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, David James The History of Intentionality, Ryan Hickerson Kierkegaard’s Analysis of Radical Evil, David A. Roberts Leibniz Re-interpreted, Lloyd Strickland Metaphysics and the End of Philosophy, H. O. Mounce Nietzsche and the Greeks, Dale Wilkerson Origins of Analytic Philosophy, Delbert Reed Philosophy of Miracles, David Corner Platonism, Music and the Listener’s Share, Christopher Norris Popper’s Theory of Science, Carlos Garcia Role of God in Spinoza’s Metaphysics, Sherry Deveaux Rousseau and the Ethics of Virtue, James Delaney Rousseau’s Theory of Freedom, Matthew Simpson Spinoza and the Stoics, Firmin DeBrabander Spinoza’s Radical Cartesian Mind, Tammy Nyden-Bullock St. Augustine and the Theory of Just War, John Mark Mattox St. Augustine of Hippo, R. W. Dyson Thomas Aquinas & John Duns Scotus, Alex Hall Tolerance and the Ethical Life, Andrew Fiala


Deborah A. Boyle

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Deborah A. Boyle 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-10: HB: 1-8470-6190-7 ISBN-13: HB: 978-1-8470-6190-4 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Boyle, Deborah A. Descartes on innate ideas/Deborah A. Boyle. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.). ISBN 978-1-84706-190-4 1. Descartes, René, 1596-1650. 2. Innate ideas (Philosophy) I. Title. B1878.K6B69 2009 121’.4--dc22

2008044104

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

1

Chapter 1: The Multiple Meanings of ‘Innate Idea’ 1.1 Ambiguities in Descartes’ Idea of ‘Idea’ 1.2 The Dispositional Interpretation of Cartesian Innate Ideas 1.3 A Unified Account of Cartesian Innate Ideas 1.4 The Recollection Account 1.5 Conclusion

7 8 13 19 22 26

Chapter 2: Innate Ideas as Objects and Acts 2.1 The Role of the Meditator’s Nature 2.2 Distinguishing the Innate from the Adventitious and the Factitious 2.3 The Clarity and Distinctness of Innate Ideas 2.4 Conclusion

28 29

Chapter 3: The Role of Reflection in Perceiving Innate Ideas 3.1 The Reflective Account 3.2 Attention, Reflection, and the Interference of the Body 3.3 Applying the Reflective Account: Some Examples 3.4 Another Example: The Innate Idea of God 3.5 Conclusion

54 55

Chapter 4: The Natural Light Reconsidered 4.1 The Natural Light, Common Notions, and Innateness 4.2 A Reply to an Objection 4.3 John Morris on the Natural Light

81

38 45 52

62 67 72 80

82 84 86

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Contents 4.4 The Natural Light and the Role of the Will 4.5 The Metaphor of Light 4.6 Conclusion

92 98 104

Chapter 5: The Natural Light and Its Truths 5.1 Perception by the Natural Light 5.2 Some Examples of Perception by the Natural Light 5.3 Conclusion

105 105 111 117

Chapter 6: Innate Ideas, Corporeal Substance, and Mathematics 6.1 The Innate Idea of Extension 6.2 Discovering the Innate Idea of Extension 6.3 Perceiving Ideas of Shapes 6.4 Perceiving Geometrical Propositions 6.5 Perceiving Other Mathematical Propositions 6.6 Descartes’ Laws of Motion 6.7 Conclusion

119 120 121 126 136 140 144 146

Notes Bibliography Index

147 170 175

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to many people for their support in bringing out this volume. I owe a great debt to my former advisor, Stephen Engstrom at the University of Pittsburgh, for his unfailingly careful attention to my thesis work, and for the many difficult questions he asked me. Joseph Camp, Tony Edwards, Kenneth Manders, and Gerald Massey also offered valuable advice and criticism. I also thank Kenneth Winkler, who first introduced me to Descartes’ Meditations, and Annette Baier, whose stimulating seminar on Descartes led me to this project. Portions of the Introduction and some of the material in Chapters 1 and 3 appeared in ‘Descartes on Innate Ideas,’ The Modern Schoolman 78, no. 1 (November 2000): 35–51. Parts of Chapter 4 originally appeared as ‘Descartes’s Natural Light Reconsidered,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 37, no. 4 (October 1999): 601–12. I am grateful to the editors of these journals for permission to reprint this material. Passages from The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vols. 1 and 2, translated and edited by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 and 1985), as well as The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3, translated and edited by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), are reproduced with the permission of the translators/editors and Cambridge University Press. I had the support of my colleagues at the College of Charleston as well as the capable help of Kate Kenney-Newhard in bringing this book to completion. Lisa Shapiro and Terry Meyers provided helpful comments on later drafts of chapters. I would also like to thank Jim Fieser, as well as Tom Crick and Sarah Campbell of the Continuum International Publishing Group, for their help in bringing this work to publication. I am also grateful to Cynthia Lowenthal, Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at the College of Charleston, for providing funds to cover expenses associated with the preparation of the manuscript.

viii

Acknowledgments

I could not have done any of this work without the support of my family and friends. I am especially grateful for the encouragement and support I received from my parents, Terry and Sheila Meyers, and from my husband, Tim, and for the loving patience of my two daughters, Lucy and Maura.

Introduction

In the Seventh Set of Objections with Replies, Descartes tells Bourdin, ‘My principal aim has always been to draw attention to certain very simple truths which are innate in our minds, so that as soon as they are pointed out to others, they will consider that they have always known them’ (CSM II 312/ AT VII 464).1 And, indeed, the Meditations focuses on the innate ideas of God, the human soul, and extended substance, showing how the meditator discovers these ideas, which he realizes he understands more clearly than anything he knows through the senses. Descartes’ Meditations is thus meant to be an example of a new, non-Aristotelian method of acquiring knowledge, a model of how to attend properly to our innate ideas, which those accustomed to the Aristotelian tradition may not even realize they possess.2 Given the centrality of innate ideas to this account, we cannot hope to understand Descartes’ project without a clear understanding of just what Descartes means when he says some idea is innate. But understanding Descartes’ conception of innate ideas is not an easy task, for two reasons. First, Descartes himself gives a wide range of examples of innate ideas; they include the ideas of God, himself, thing, thought, truth, mind, body, triangles, and the number three.3 Other innate ideas include the idea of extension, the truth that the three interior angles of a triangle are equivalent to the sum of two right angles and other geometrical truths, and propositions that Descartes calls ‘common notions,’ such as the proposition that ‘there must be at least as much reality in the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause.’4 Descartes also claims at one point that ‘the very ideas of the motions themselves and of the figures are innate in us,’ and indeed he goes so far as to say that ‘the ideas of pain, colours, sounds and the like must be all the more innate’ (CSM I 304/AT VIIIB 359). The items on this list are so varied that it is not obvious why they are innate, or in what respects they are supposed to differ from ideas Descartes thinks are not innate, such as one’s perception of a fire or one’s idea of a hippogriff. So we cannot determine what Descartes means by ‘innate idea’

2


just by considering the ideas themselves; we need to see what he actually says about innateness. But, there, too, as we shall see, we are faced with a rather bewildering range of characterizations and metaphors, from which it is not easy, at first glance, to draw a single conception of innateness. For example, regarding the criticism that infants do not have innate ideas, he says that ‘when we say that an idea is innate in us, we do not mean that it is always there before us. . . . We simply mean that we have within ourselves the faculty of summoning up the idea’ (CSM II 132/AT VII 189). This passage seems to suggest that an innate idea is no more than a faculty or disposition to think of that idea. Yet he also speaks of innate ideas as ‘stamped’ or ‘implanted’ in our minds;5 he writes of bringing forth his innate idea of God from the ‘treasure house’ of his mind (CSM II 46/AT VII 67); and he describes perceiving his innate ideas of shapes and numbers as ‘like noticing for the first time things which were long present within me although I had never turned my mental gaze on them before’ (CSM II 44/AT VII 63–4). Such metaphors suggest that innate ideas are present in us as more than mere faculties. The variety in Descartes’ claims about innate ideas has led some commentators to conclude that he held several distinct and unrelated conceptions of innateness,6 or even that he flip-flopped between incompatible conceptions. One notable example of this tendency is Robert McRae’s 1972 article ‘Innate Ideas.’ McRae argues that Descartes lacks a single unified theory of innate ideas; rather, he claims, the Cartesian corpus contains two theories of innateness (which McRae calls the ‘reflective’ and ‘recollection’ accounts), as well as passages which suggest a dispositional theory of innateness.7 McRae seeks at the end of his article to argue that all three conceptions of innateness have something in common, but he nonetheless is committed to the claim that Descartes’ work contains distinct, unrelated senses of ‘innate idea.’8 John Cottingham also finds more than one conception of innateness in the Cartesian corpus, arguing that Descartes was temporarily tempted by a dispositional account, but that his more considered view was that innate ideas are ‘present but submerged.’ Cottingham considers these accounts to be incompatible rivals.9 Neither Cottingham nor McRae offers any explanation for why the Cartesian corpus might contain more than one account, and this seems to me to be an uncharitable reading, taking Descartes to be at worst confused and at best undecided about what he means when he describes an idea as innate or says, for example, that infants possess innate ideas. Other commentators have attributed only a dispositional view to Descartes,10 but such dispositional interpretations have lacked details, and have not satisfactorily explained those

Introduction

3

passages in which Descartes suggests that innate ideas are more than just dispositions. I will argue that Descartes held a unified conception of innateness. This reading turns on noticing a triple ambiguity in how Descartes uses the phrase ‘innate idea.’ As we will see, Descartes himself points out that the word ‘idea’ has two senses, and his use of ‘innate idea’ reveals a third sense, as well. Thus I will argue that ‘innate idea’ can mean either an object of some act of thought (what I will call an innate idea in the objective sense, or, following Vere Chappell, an innate ideao), an act of thought (what I will call an innate idea in the material sense, or innate ideam), or a capacity (an innate idea in a dispositional sense, or innate idead).11 The mere phrase ‘innate idea’ is thus ambiguous between the objectively existing thing (the innate ideao), the act of perception of such an idea (the innate ideam), and the capacity we have to perceive it (the innate idead). However, unlike the multiple senses of ‘innate idea’ ascribed to Descartes in other interpretations in the secondary literature, the three senses of ‘innate idea’ in this interpretation are interdependent, thus providing a more unified account of Cartesian innate ideas; we need not resort to attributing conflicting accounts to Descartes. This reading is developed in Chapters 1 through 3. In Chapter 1, I survey other accounts of Cartesian innateness, by scholars such as Cottingham and McRae, and I show how elucidating the three meanings of ‘innate idea’ can solve various interpretive problems. Chapter 2 then focuses on the objective and material senses of ‘innate idea,’ while Chapter 3 elaborates on the dispositional sense of ‘innate idea.’ Chapter 3 also begins the process of showing how various Cartesian innate ideas are discovered, the topic which occupies the rest of the book. I suggested earlier that Descartes’ examples of innate ideas seem to comprise a disparate grab-bag of cases. However, a classification of ‘natures’ that Descartes makes in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind serves as a useful heuristic device for structuring my discussion of the various ways our capacity to perceive innate ideas can be exercised. I have thus organized my discussion of the Cartesian examples of innate ideas (in Chapters 3 through 6) around the Rules’ division of ‘natures’ into the purely intellectual simples, the purely material simples, and the ‘common simples.’ While the purely intellectual and purely material simples are non-propositional concepts, the category of ‘common simples’ includes both non-propositional concepts and propositions. Concerning these ‘simple natures,’ Descartes writes that they are ‘said to be simple with respect to our intellect’ (CSM I 44/AT X 419)—that is, they

4


are known ‘so clearly and distinctly that they cannot be divided by the mind into others which are more distinctly known’ (CSM I 44/AT X 418). His characterizations of the three classes of simple natures as purely intellectual, purely material, and ‘common’ pertain both to the objects in which the simples inhere, and to the means by which we know the simples. Thus the purely intellectual simples—such as knowledge, doubt, ignorance, and volition—are modes of thought, and are perceivable through thought alone. Simple natures like shape, extension, and motion ‘are recognized to be present only in bodies,’ and evidently (as I will argue in Chapter 6) require some kind of corporeal image in order to be perceived. Finally, the common simples can be ‘ascribed indifferently, now to corporeal things, now to spirits,’ and can be known ‘either by the pure intellect or by the intellect as it intuits the images of material things’ (CSM I 44–5/AT X 419–20). Descartes’ examples of common simples are ‘existence, unity, duration, and the like’ (CSM I 45/AT X 419), and he specifies that ‘the corresponding privations and negations’ should be considered as simple natures, too; for example, ‘nothing’ is the negation corresponding to ‘existence,’ while ‘an instant’ corresponds to ‘duration’ (CSM I 45/AT X 420). These are all non-propositional concepts. He adds that propositional ‘common notions’ are related to the class of common simples: To this class we must also refer those common notions which are, as it were, links which connect other simple natures together, and whose selfevidence is the basis for all the rational inferences we make. Examples of these are: ‘Things that are the same as a third thing are the same as each other’; ‘Things that cannot be related in the same way to a third thing are different in some respect.’ (CSM I 45/AT X 419) Curiously, however, the topic of simple and complex natures hardly appears in the Meditations. The closest Descartes comes to employing this language is in the First Meditation. After proposing that he might be dreaming, the meditator says that ‘it must at least be admitted that certain other even simpler and more universal things are real,’ and he lists some examples: ‘corporeal nature in general, and its extension; the shape of extended things; the quantity, or size and number of these things; the place in which they may exist, the time through which they may endure, and so on’ (CSM II 14/AT VII 20). However, because this is only the First Meditation, one might worry that the meditator would not later endorse this list; that is, it might turn out that these things only appear to be simple natures.12

Introduction

5

But Descartes’ language of ‘simples,’ and his classification of them into the purely intellectual, the purely material, and the two types of common simples, does recur in the Principles of Philosophy, and the discussion there strongly echoes the language of the Rules.13 Descartes proposes to ‘list all the simple notions [simplices omnes notions], from which our thoughts are composed’ (my translation; AT VIIIA 22), and he mentions several kinds: The most general items which we regard as things are substance, duration, order, number, and any other items of this kind which extend to all classes of things. But I recognize only two ultimate classes of things: first, intellectual or thinking things, i.e. those which pertain to mind or thinking substance; and secondly, material things, i.e. those which pertain to extended substance or body. Perception, volition, and all the modes both of perceiving and of willing are referred to thinking substance; while to extended substance belong size (that is, extension in length, breadth, and depth), shape, motion, position, divisibility of component parts and the like. (CSM I 208–9/AT VIIIA 22–3) Here, the non-propositional simples are grouped together. The ‘most general items’ are clearly the same ones he earlier called ‘common simples,’ while the modes of thought correspond to the ‘purely intellectual’ simples of the Rules,14 and the modes of matter to the ‘purely material’ simples. And Principles I 49 treats of the eternal truths, which Descartes says are ‘termed common notions or axioms’ (CSM I 209/AT VIIIA 23). Although the examples are not the same as those given in the Rules, they do resemble the propositional common notions of the Rules.15 Because Descartes is willing to speak of simple natures in works written both before and after the Meditations, and because the view appears to be essentially the same in those two works, I conclude that his view in the Meditations is no different. And since the simple ideas mentioned in the Rules and Principles are also ideas that Descartes characterizes (either in the Principles or in his other later works) as innate, it seems reasonable to organize a discussion of examples of Cartesian innate ideas around the Rules’ division of the simple natures. Chapter 3 focuses on our innate ideas of some ‘purely intellectual’ and ‘common’ simple natures, as well as the idea of God. In Chapters 4 and 5, I examine the truths said to be perceived by the natural light, which, I argue, correspond to the ‘common notions’ mentioned in the Principles. Finally, in Chapter 6, I examine the ideas of the ‘purely material’ natures of extension and shape, the geometrical ‘common notions,’ and a type of innate idea which does not seem to be included

6


in the classifications given in the Rules and Principles: particular geometrical and arithmetical truths. My interpretation of Cartesian innate ideas draws quite a bit—as one would expect—on the Meditations. But my reading is not meant to be an account of innate ideas only in that work. My aim is, rather, to draw on the full Cartesian corpus, to try to develop an account of innate ideas that fits as many of the texts as possible. This is not to say that I do not think Descartes’ views changed over time; innate ideas seem to have played no role at all in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, and indeed, I shall argue, what Descartes meant by ‘idea’ was radically different in this pre-Meditations period of his life. But from the publication of the Meditations in 1641 until his death in 1650, Descartes’ views about innate ideas do not seem to have changed. And while Descartes’ remarks on innate ideas during this period have seemed to many readers to point to different or even contradictory account of innateness, underlying these remarks there is a unified theory. In the rest of this book, I will be making the case for this view.

Chapter 1

The Multiple Meanings of ‘Innate Idea’

Understanding Descartes’ conception of innate ideas first requires understanding what he means by ‘idea.’ In his replies to Hobbes, Descartes asserts that he decided to use the word ‘idea’ ‘because it was the standard philosophical term used to refer to the forms of perception belonging to the divine mind’ (CSM II 127/AT VII 181). But even if this term did have a standard meaning in philosophy at the time, Descartes’ use of it engendered some confusion; in addition to elucidating its meaning in his replies to Hobbes, he claims in the Fifth Set of Replies that the objector, Gassendi, had misinterpreted what he meant by ‘idea’ (CSM II 253/AT VII 366). He also clarifies his meaning in letters to Mersenne of July 1641 (CSMK III 183–5/AT III 382–3 and 392–3). Getting clear about what Descartes means by ‘idea’ is complicated by the fact that as he uses it, the term is ambiguous, in two distinct ways. First, in Descartes’ early works, the term ‘idea’ refers to a brain state, while in the Meditations he uses it to characterize a purely mental phenomenon. Second, and more importantly, Descartes points out in the Preface to the Meditations that the word ‘idea’ (now understood as a mental phenomenon rather than as a brain state) has two senses, idea as ‘act’ of thought and idea as ‘object’ of thought. Taking this latter ambiguity seriously is the first step in developing a unified account of Cartesian innate ideas, for it means that ‘innate idea,’ too, is ambiguous between idea as act and idea as object.1 I discuss these issues in Section 1. But it is also important to note a third meaning of ‘innate idea’ in the Cartesian corpus: ‘innate idea’ can also mean a disposition or capacity to have a certain idea. This sense of ‘innate idea’ is the subject of Section 2, where I will also describe and respond to the secondary literature on this aspect of Descartes’ theory of innateness. As we will see, scholars have been divided on how to interpret the passages in which Descartes characterizes innate ideas as dispositions. Some commentators dismiss these passages as aberrations; others see them as expressing Descartes’ real theory of innate

8


ideas. I argue that neither interpretation is satisfactory: the passages should neither be dismissed nor specially privileged. In Section 3, I turn to John Cottingham’s interpretation of Cartesian innate ideas. Cottingham maintains that Descartes was inconsistent, endorsing both a dispositional account and what he calls a ‘present but submerged’ account of innate ideas. I argue, however, that these two accounts are not actually inconsistent; a unified account of Cartesian innate ideas is possible. On this interpretation, there are three senses of ‘innate idea’: innate idea in the objective sense, material sense, and dispositional sense. But, I will argue, these three senses are interdependent; thus, on my account, we need not take Descartes to be confused or inconsistent in positing multiple senses of ‘innate idea.’ Finally, in Section 4, I turn to another account of Cartesian innateness to be found in the secondary literature, what Robert McRae has identified as the ‘recollection’ account. I argue that the passages McRae points to in support of his interpretation need not be read as indicating a new account of innateness; rather, these passages can be read as consistent with the unified account for which I am arguing.

1.1 Ambiguities in Descartes’ Idea of ‘Idea’ In their objections to the Meditations, both Hobbes and Gassendi evidently take ‘idea’ to be equivalent to ‘image’ (CSM II 126–7/AT VII 179 and CSM II 253/AT VII 366). In defense of his use of this apparently puzzling term, Descartes writes in his Replies to Hobbes: I used the word ‘idea’ because it was the standard philosophical term used to refer to the forms of perception belonging to the divine mind, even though we recognize that God does not possess any corporeal imagination. And besides, there was not any more appropriate term at my disposal. (CSM II 127–8/AT VII 181) As this remark makes clear, Descartes means the word ‘idea’ to refer to a mode of thought, and not to a mode of extended substance. Descartes writes in the Second Set of Replies that it is not only the images depicted in the imagination which I call ‘ideas’. Indeed, in so far as these images are in the corporeal imagination, that is, are depicted in some part of the brain, I do not call them ‘ideas’ at all; I call them ‘ideas’ only in so far as they give form to the mind itself,


9

when it is directed towards that part of the brain. (CSM II 113/AT VII 160–1) This was certainly true of the Meditations and Descartes’ later works. However, in his early works, such as the Rules for the Direction Of the Mind, the World, and the Treatise On Man, Descartes used ‘idea’ in a quite different sense, to characterize modes of both corporeal and incorporeal substances. In other words, ‘idea’ in the earlier works is ambiguous between a corporeal and an incorporeal sense.2 Thus in a discussion of our mental faculties in the Rules (probably written before 16293), Descartes writes: Thirdly, the ‘common’ sense functions like a seal, fashioning in the phantasy or imagination, as if in wax, the same figures or ideas which come, pure and without body, from the external senses. The phantasy is a genuine part of the body, and is large enough to allow different parts of it to take on many different figures and, generally, to retain them for some time.4 (CSM I 41–2/AT X 414) If the phantasy is a part of the body, a corporeal substance, and if ideas can be fashioned in the phantasy, then those ideas must also be corporeal. In the World, written between 1630 and 1632,5 Descartes consistently uses ‘idea’ to refer to a mode of mental substance, but he typically uses the phrase ‘the ideas we have in our mind.’6 That he felt the need to specify that he meant ideas in the mind suggests that he thought there could be ideas in the body, too. And, indeed, just such a usage appears in the Treatise on Man, which he probably began to write in late 1632.7 There, Descartes explains how the mechanism of the human body would operate even without being joined to a rational soul. In his account of sensation, he calls the images which are formed in the corporeal imagination ‘idées’ (CSM I 106/ AT XI 176), and he explicitly states, ‘I wish to apply the term “idea” generally to all the impressions which the spirits can receive as they leave gland H [the location of the imagination and the “common” sense]’ (CSM I 106/AT XI 177). The ‘spirits’ in this account are corporeal entities, and the ‘impressions’ they receive are, apparently, a physical configuration imparted to them. Thus the word ‘idea’ is being used to describe a brain occurrence, something corporeal rather than something in the soul.8 This vacillation between two senses of ‘idea’ could be explained if Descartes had not yet worked out his doctrine that mental substance is distinct from bodily substance. And, in fact, there is little evidence that at the time of writing the Rules Descartes had clearly formulated his doctrine of

10


two substances;9 if this is right, then there would have been no reason for him to restrict ‘idea’ to one substance rather than the other. We can see the beginnings of the two-substance doctrine in the World and the Treatise On Man. But only when he began to explore the ramifications of a twosubstance doctrine, around the time of the Meditations, would Descartes have realized that he needed either to restrict ‘idea’ to a purely mental sense, or to emphasize that the term has two senses; the passage from the Second Replies shows that he chose the first of these options.10 By the time of the Meditations, Descartes is quite emphatic that by ‘idea’ he means a mode of thought. Yet an important ambiguity remains in Descartes’ use of the term ‘idea’ in the later works. While he does consistently use ‘idea’ in the later works to characterize mental rather than physical phenomena, he points out in the Preface to the Meditations that ‘“Idea” can be taken materially, as an operation of the intellect. . . . Alternatively, it can be taken objectively, as the thing represented by that operation’ (CSM II 7/AT VII 8). In other words, ‘idea’ might refer to an act of thinking, or it might refer to the object of that act. In referring to someone’s idea of a horse, for example, Descartes might mean to refer to the act whereby the person thinks of the horse (the idea in the material sense), but he might also mean to refer to the object of the person’s thought—that is, to the horse being represented (the idea in the objective sense). In his paper ‘The Theory of Ideas,’ Vere Chappell rightly points out that this distinction is ‘the key to understanding Descartes’ whole theory of ideas, which itself is the central component of his theory of knowledge.’11 Chappell also usefully abbreviates ‘idea in the material sense’ and ‘idea in the objective sense’ as ideam and ideao, respectively, a convention I shall adopt. The distinction between ideasm and ideaso should be borne in mind whenever Descartes refers to ideas. Consider Descartes’ definition of ‘idea’ in the Second Set of Replies: I understand this term to mean the form [formam] of any given thought, immediate perception of which makes me aware of the thought. Hence, whenever I express something in words, and understand what I am saying, this very fact makes it certain that there is within me an idea of what is signified by the words in question. (CSM II 113/AT VII 160) In the same passage, he says that ‘thought’ means ‘everything that is within us in such a way that we are immediately aware of it. Thus all the operations of the will, the intellect, the imagination, and the senses are thoughts’ (CSM


11

II 113/AT VII 160). If, as he says here, operations of the intellect are ‘thoughts,’ and (as he says in the Preface to the Meditations) ideasm are operations of the intellect, then thoughts must be ideasm. But when he characterizes ideas as the ‘forms’ of particular thoughts, is he referring to ideasm, or ideaso? I think Descartes’ use of the term ‘form’ is a clue that he is referring in this case to ideaso. Although Descartes explicitly rejects scholastic forms in his account of sense-perception, his use of the technical term ‘forma’ evokes the scholastic distinction between form and matter. According to the scholastics, the form of a thing is what makes that thing what it is. Descartes can be read as suggesting that the ‘matter’ of a thought is the activity of the mind itself, while its ‘form’ is the idea taken objectively; the idea ‘informs’ the mind, so that what the mind thinks is a thought—an ideam— of the thing of which it has an ideao. When I have a sensory experience of heat, for example, the ideao of heat informs my mind; when I have a visual sensory experience of a book, the ideao of the book informs my mind; when I think of God, the ideao of God informs my mind; and so on. What does Descartes mean, then, when he says that we have an idea? How we answer this question will depend on which sense of ‘idea’ is in play. Since ideasm are acts of thought, one kind of account of what it means to say we have an idea will appeal to the intellectual act that occurs when we have that idea. Thus to say one has an idea might mean one is presented with a visual image, or a sense-perception of another kind. Or it might mean one understands something. For example, in the Third Meditation, the meditator says that he ‘understands [intelligam]’ what a thing, truth and thought are; these are things of which he has innate ideas (CSM II 26/AT VII 38). Likewise, when the meditator refers a few pages later to his ‘idea of God,’ he says, ‘By the word “God” I understand [intelligo] a substance that is infinite, <eternal, immutable,> independent, supremely intelligent, supremely powerful, and which created both myself and everything else’ (CSM II 31/AT VII 45). In these cases, to have an idea is to know what the thing is; it is to have a concept of the thing, which presumably means either that one can list various attributes that belong to it or that one can identify the thing under various conditions.12 When Descartes refers to mental operations like these, acts such as understanding or perceiving, he is most likely referring to an ideam. On the other hand, if we are referring to an ideao, then to say we have some idea is to make a claim about some object of thought. Descartes clarifies this sense of ‘idea’ in the First Set of Replies, saying that ‘an idea is the thing which is thought of in so far as it has objective being in the intellect’

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(CSM II 74/AT VII 102). ‘Objective being’ signifies ‘the object’s being in the intellect in the way in which its objects are normally there’ (CSM II 754/AT VII 102). For example, he says, ‘the idea of the sun is the sun itself existing in the intellect—not of course formally existing, as it does in the heavens, but objectively existing, i.e. in the way in which objects normally are in the intellect’ (CSM II 75/AT VII 102–3). His point is that there are two types of existence or being that an object can have. To exist formally is just to exist in the world; substances and their modes possess this sort of existence. To exist objectively, however, is to exist in an intellect. Thus a tree exists formally in my front yard; it exists objectively when I perceive it. So, to say that one has an ideao is to say that a certain object of thought is present in the mind. But must an ideao be the object of some occurrent act of thought? In other words, can we make any sense of the notion of an ideao without there being an intellectual act in which the ideao figures—that is, without there being an ideam? More bluntly, can an ideao exist in the mind without being perceived, that is, without the thinker being explicitly aware of it?13 The received view is that the answer to these questions is ‘no.’ Chappell asserts that to say that ideasm represent ideaso is to ‘suggest that the relation is necessary, at least on the side of the ideao: for it suggests that every ideao is represented by an ideam.’14 Later he suggests that ‘there is no ideam that is not joined to some one ideao by the representative relation.’15 Similarly, Lilli Alanen asserts that the two senses of ‘idea’ are ‘two inseparable sides of the same phenomenon that necessarily occur together—although they can be considered apart for purposes of analysis.’16 I shall argue that while this may be true of Cartesian adventitious ideas, it need not be true of Cartesian innate ideas. Adventitious ideas, Descartes says in the Third Meditation, differ from innate ideas insofar as the latter seem to come only from his nature, while the former seem to come from some other source—namely, from external objects (CSM II 26/AT VII 38). It is indeed true of Cartesian adventitious ideas that the ideao is the object of some occurrent act of thought. To have an adventitious idea in the mind is to have a thought of which that idea is the object; that is, for adventitious ideas, every idea in the objective sense is necessarily the object of a correlative idea in the material sense. However, I shall argue that for Descartes, innate ideas can be in the mind without yet being the actual objects of any occurrent act of thought. That is, for innate ideas, the material and objective senses of ‘idea’ are less closely related: an innate idea can be present in the mind (that is, we can have an innate ideao) without there being any act of the intellect


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by which we perceive it (that is, without there being a correlative innate ideam). This suggestion may seem unintuitive. However, it allows us to make good sense of the various passages in which Descartes suggests that we can have innate ideas which we haven’t yet noticed. For example, although he thinks that the idea of God is innate, he tells Burman that ‘it does not . . . seem probable’ that infants have an actual idea of God (CSMK III 336/AT V 150). And in a letter to Hyperaspistes he says that ‘everyone has within himself an implicit idea of God, that is to say, an aptitude to perceive it explicitly; but I am not surprised that not everyone is aware that he has it or notices that he has it’ (CSMK III 194/AT III 430). He says much the same thing in a 1645 letter to Clerselier, writing that ‘although the idea of God is imprinted on the human mind in such a way that everyone has within himself the power to know him, this does not prevent many people passing through their whole lives without ever having a distinct representation of this idea’ (CSMK III 248/AT IV 187–8; Descartes’ emphasis). In other words, we can be said to have an innate idea of God even when we have not actually perceived that idea. We can easily make sense of Descartes’ claim if we take him to mean that we may have an innate ideao without yet having a correlative innate ideam. It may be objected that another explanation of these passages is possible: Descartes may mean simply that to have an innate idea is to have a disposition to perceive the idea. If this is so, then Descartes can say that innate ideas exist unperceived without having to imply that they exist in the full-blown sense of having objective being in the mind even when unperceived. However, as I shall show in the next section, reading Descartes as holding a purely dispositional account of innate ideas is problematic. First, I do not think it does justice to the sorts of passages just cited, in which Descartes seems to suggest that innate ideas are in some sense present in the mind before they are perceived. Second, as John Cottingham has pointed out, it is difficult to differentiate a purely dispositional account of innate ideas from the empiricist’s claim that we simply acquire these ideas over time, through experience.

1.2 The Dispositional Interpretation of Cartesian Innate Ideas Descartes does frequently speak of innate ideas as faculties or dispositions. In the letter to Hyperaspistes, for example, he refers to an ‘aptitude

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[aptitudinem]’ to perceive the idea of God; in the letter to Clerselier, he refers to a ‘power [faculté]’ to do so. Likewise, he tells Hobbes that ‘when we say that an idea is innate in us, we do not mean that it is always there before us. This would mean that no idea was innate. We simply mean that we have within ourselves the faculty of summoning up the idea [facultatem illam eliciendi]’ (CSM II 132/AT VII 189). He makes a similar claim in a 1643 letter to Voetius, writing that ‘all those things whose knowledge is said to be naturally implanted in us are not for that reason expressly known by us; they are merely such that we come to know them by the power of our own native intelligence, without any sensory experience’ (CSMK III 222/ AT VIIIB 166–7). And the text in which Descartes most obviously seems to endorse such a view is the 1647 Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, where he remarks that the sense in which he calls certain ideas ‘innate’ is the same sense as that in which we say that generosity is ‘innate’ in certain families, or that certain diseases such as gout or stones are innate in others: it is not so much that the babes of such families suffer from these diseases in their mother’s womb, but simply that they are born with a certain ‘faculty’ or tendency to contract them. (CSM I 304/AT VIIIB 358) Descartes also states there that ‘these ideas, along with that faculty [of thinking] are innate in us, i.e. they always exist in us potentially [potentiâ nobis semper inexistentes]’ (CSM I 305/AT VIIIB 361). These passages seem to suggest that to say one has an innate idea is to say that one has a natural, inborn capacity to come to have that idea, and that until one has exercised that capacity, innate ideas are in the knower only potentially. But curiously, scholars have been split on how to interpret such passages. While some have argued that the dispositional account fully captures what Descartes means by ‘innate idea,’ others have actually argued that a dispositional account should not be attributed to Descartes at all. It is my view that neither interpretation is correct. I begin with the view that Descartes should not really be taken to be describing innate ideas as dispositions. One scholar who has taken this stance is Vere Chappell. According to Chappell, Descartes’ suggestion that ‘innate idea’ can mean ‘a potentiality or disposition rather than anything actual or occurrent’ is ‘in no way essential’ to Descartes’ doctrine of innate ideas, and was probably ‘merely inadvertent’ on Descartes’ part.17 Yet given that Descartes describes innate ideas as dispositions in several texts, over the course of several years, Chappell’s reading seems implausible. Such passages cannot be so easily dismissed.


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Another scholar who rejects attributing a dispositional account of innateness to Descartes is Robert McRae. McRae concedes that the Comments On a Certain Broadsheet seems to endorse a dispositional theory of innateness, according to which innate ideas are ‘powers or predispositions or predeterminations in the mind, native to it, to act in certain ways.’18 Yet he argues that there are two reasons not to read Descartes in this way. His first objection is that a dispositional interpretation of innate ideas conflicts with a conception of the mind that occurs throughout Descartes’ works, signified by his use of the wax analogy. According to McRae, this analogy shows that Descartes espoused a ‘tabula rasa conception of the mind’ similar to Locke’s.19 As McRae interprets Descartes, the mind, like wax, is passive, receiving its ideas either through reflection on itself (in the case of the innate ideas) or through attending to images impressed on the brain by the senses (in the case of adventitious and factitious ideas);20 reflection is one means by which the mind comes to have ideas. But, McRae claims, this conception of the mind as passively receiving ideas conflicts with the conception of mind underlying the dispositional conception of innateness, where the mind must have an active faculty (or faculties) to produce ideas. This disparity is, according to McRae, one reason not to attribute such a dispositional view to Descartes. But I think McRae is just wrong here. Although Descartes does frequently use an analogy with wax, he does not always use that analogy to describe the passivity of the mind’s reception of ideas. For example, in the Rules, where McRae says Descartes ‘worked out in detail’ the tabula rasa conception of the mind, Descartes is, in two cases, actually comparing the human body, not the mind, to wax; in sense-perception, he says, the senses take on impressions just as wax does, and in imagination, the ‘phantasy,’ a ‘genuine part of the body,’ takes on impressions just as wax does (CSM I 40–1/AT X 412–4). Furthermore, even when Descartes does use the analogy to describe the mind’s passive reception of ideas, he never suggests that that is all the mind does. For example, in the Rules, Descartes compares the ‘cognitive power’ to wax—but he also says that it is sometimes like the seal, too (CSM I 42/AT X 415).21 Because will is also a faculty of mind, the mind can be active as well as passive. So long as we recognize that the wax analogy only captures part of Descartes’ conception of mind, there is no problem reconciling it with a dispositional account on which the mind has active faculties of producing ideas in itself. The second problem McRae finds with attributing a dispositional account of innateness to Descartes is that he sees this account as conflicting with Descartes’ views in the Optics. This work is relevant, McRae says, because of

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Descartes’ claim in the Comments that he has already explained his views about our ideas of motions and figures in the Optics.22 In the Optics, McRae says, Descartes shows that our perceptions of the size, shape, position, and distance of objects are judgments which the mind makes on the basis of sensory data—sensory data which function for it as signs, not copes [sic] or resemblances. The signs give the mind the occasion for judging, or, in the language of the Notes, the occasion to form these ideas by means of an innate faculty. It is the faculty of judging which is innate to the mind, and if we speak of the conceptions which we form through judgment as innate, it is only because they are formed by that innate faculty, not produced by what comes through the senses. It is impossible to read into the Dioptrics any conception of ideas as innate active dispositions. They are not potencies prior to acts of judgment. They are products of judgment.23 McRae writes as if it is perfectly clear that an idea that results from an act of judgment cannot also be considered a potency prior to the act of judgment. But he offers no reason why that must be so. Cannot the innate faculty of judging to which McRae refers be considered a natural disposition to make various judgments under certain circumstances? In sum, I think McRae’s arguments against finding a dispositional account of innate ideas in Descartes’ works are unsound. Moreover, while McRae thinks that we cannot read the Comments as suggesting that innate ideas are those that the mind has an active disposition to produce in itself, he unfortunately offers no account of how we should take those remarks in the Comments that seem to suggest such a picture. Thus McRae leaves us with the claim that although Descartes apparently endorses a dispositional account of innateness in that work, such an account is inconsistent with some of his other views—but without explaining away the apparent endorsement of the dispositional view. John Cottingham also rejects attributing a purely dispositional account to Descartes, but for a different reason. As he sees it, innatists must deal with a dilemma. On the one hand, the innatist must be able to explain why infants seem not to know those ideas which are said to be innate. A dispositional account does have an answer to this worry, by treating innate ideas as dispositions that can be actualized in adults but are not yet actualized in infants. But, according to Cottingham, the problem with a dispositional answer to the first horn of the dilemma is that it lands the innatist on the other horn, which he describes as follows:


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the ‘potential’ or ‘embryonic’ presence of the ideas is such a vague concept that one wonders how it really differs from the empiricist hypothesis that all ideas are gradually acquired through experience. ‘S has innate potential knowledge of X’ risks becoming merely a portentous way of saying ‘S can learn X.’24 The solution which Cottingham proposes is to read Descartes as holding what he calls a ‘present but submerged’ reading of innate ideas. According to Cottingham, Descartes thinks that children do possess full-blown innate ideas, but that their access to these ideas is blocked, ‘impeded or obstructed,’ because their minds are so busy with physical, bodily matters.25 Cottingham maintains that this account can explain why children do not have fully formed innate ideas, but without depending on the ‘vague concept’ of potentiality. I will discuss this suggestion in Section 3. For now, it is enough to note that Cottingham believes that both the dispositional account and the present-but-submerged account are at work in Descartes’ writings, and that these two accounts are incompatible with each other. On Cottingham’s view, then, Descartes did not have a unified theory of innateness. So far, I have examined the views of scholars who either deny that Descartes held a dispositional account of innateness, or hold that Descartes is inconsistent, providing a dispositional account as well as some other account. Some more recent scholars have argued for a different view: that when Descartes says that an idea is innate, he means no more than that we have such a disposition. Thus Steven Nadler writes that ‘Descartes does not think that innate ideas are actual concrete and occurrent thoughts stored up in the mind like the contents of a warehouse,’26 and goes on to give only a dispositional account of Cartesian innate ideas. Similarly, Desmond Clarke writes that ‘It is well known that Descartes offers a dispositional account of the innateness of ideas,’27 and he rejects the possibility that Descartes might think that innate ideas could exist in any more full-blooded sense than as mere dispositions. In support of this view, Clarke cites Descartes’ annotations to the Principles of Philosophy, in which Descartes rejects the view that innate ideas ‘are always actually depicted in some part of our mind [semper actu in aliqua mentis nostrae parte depictas], in the way in which many verses are contained in a book of Virgil’ (AT XI 655).28 But Descartes’ reference to an innate idea being ‘depicted’ by an ‘act’ of thought seems to be a reference to innate ideas in the material sense. Thus this passage can be read as meaning only that we do not always have innate ideasm; it does not rule out the possibility of having unperceived innate ideaso, unless one has already

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stipulated that not having an innate ideam entails not possessing a correlative innate ideao. There are two reasons why we should not follow Clarke, Nadler, and others in ascribing a purely dispositional account of innateness to Descartes. First, as Cottingham notes, such an account does not clearly differ from the empiricist’s view that supposedly innate ideas are acquired through experience. Second, it must ignore those passages in which Descartes seems to suggest that innate ideas are present as more than mere dispositions. As I mentioned in Section 1, there are several passages in which Descartes seems to suggest that innate ideas are stored up in the mind in some more full-blooded way, like the contents of a warehouse. They are, in John Cottingham’s apt phrase, ‘present but submerged.’ Consider this striking analogy from a letter from Descartes to Mersenne: Be sure that there is nothing in my Metaphysics which I do not believe to be either very evident by the natural light or else demonstrated very precisely; and I am confident that I can make it understood by those who are able and willing to meditate on it. But I cannot bestow intelligence on people, or make them see what lies on the floor of a closet if they refuse to go in to have a look. (CSMK III 169/AT III 284–5) ‘What lies on the floor of a closet’ could plausibly be taken to be analogous to our innate ideas. The analogy seems to suggest that innate ideas are present in the mind of a thinker even before she knows that she possesses them, and that these ideas are present in the same way before and after they are discovered; after all, the item one discovers when one opens the door of a closet or shines a light into its depths does not itself change upon being discovered. Similarly, in his letter to Voetius Descartes describes the slave boy of Plato’s Meno as ‘able to dig out [erueret] certain truths from his own mind which he had not previously recognized were there’ (CSMK III 222–3/AT VIIIB 167). The act of ‘digging out,’ one might think, is what would be required if innate ideas were ‘present but submerged.’ Descartes also frequently describes innate ideas as ‘implanted,’ ‘impressed,’ or ‘imprinted’ in the mind. Such language could imply that the ideas are already present in the mind, in full-blown form rather than merely as capacities. For example, in the Third Meditation Descartes says that the innate idea of God is ‘as it were, the mark of the craftsman stamped [impressa] on his work’ (CSM II 35/AT VII 51). In the First Set of Replies, he remarks that ‘the idea of God is implanted [indita] in the same way in the minds of all’ (CSM II 76/AT VII 105), and in the Principles of Philosophy


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he advises that we should ‘lay aside the preconceived opinions acquired from the senses, and in this connection make use of the intellect alone, carefully attending to the ideas implanted in it by nature [à naturâ inditas]’ (CSM I 224/AT VIIIA 42). Such passages suggest that God takes an actual idea and places it among the contents of the infant mind—although it may not be perceived until later in life. According to Cottingham, Descartes attempted to avoid the problems of a dispositional account by espousing the ‘present but submerged’ account of innate ideas. According to Cottingham, Descartes thinks that children do possess full-blown innate ideas, but that their access to these ideas is blocked, ‘impeded or obstructed,’ because their minds are so busy with physical, bodily matters.29 Cottingham maintains that this account can explain why children do not seem to have fully formed innate ideas, but without depending on the ‘vague concept’ of potentiality. We have just seen various passages which I think provide support for the ‘present but submerged’ reading, passages in which Descartes describes innate ideas as being hidden in a closet and as being ‘stamped’ on the mind. However, these are not the passages Cottingham himself cites in support of his present-but-submerged interpretation; rather, Cottingham’s evidence consists of passages which describe how innate ideas in an infant are ‘swamped’ by the infant’s preoccupation with bodily thoughts. For example, Cottingham cites Descartes’ claim that ‘In our childhood the mind was so immersed in the body that although there was much that it perceived clearly, it never perceived anything distinctly’30 (CSM I 208/AT VIIIA 22). He also says that his interpretation is suggested by Descartes’ remarks that the mind can think of more than one thing at a time ‘provided that one thought does not obstruct another,’ which he goes on to say is the problem in infancy (CSMK III 336/ AT V 150).31 Cottingham sees the ‘present but submerged’ account as an incompatible rival to the dispositional account. He suggests that while Descartes was temporarily tempted by a dispositional account, the present-but-submerged account represents his more considered view. Thus, as Cottingham reads him, Descartes did not have a unified account of innateness, but vacillated between two very different accounts.

1.3 A Unified Account of Cartesian Innate Ideas Yet the curious fact is that the present but submerged account is not actually opposed to the dispositional view. Once we take note of the triple

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ambiguity of ‘innate idea,’ we can see that both accounts are correct. As I argued earlier, ‘innate idea’ is, for Descartes, ambiguous between three things: idea in the objective sense, as an object of thought (innate ideao); idea in the material sense, an act of thought or actual perceiving (innate ideam); and the capacity or disposition to perceive some innate ideao (which we could now abbreviate as ‘innate idead’).32 On this interpretation, a reference to the ‘innate idea of God’ could mean one of three things. It could mean God himself as he exists objectively in the intellect, the ‘true’ nature of God which we hope to learn more and more about (the innate ideao of God). But it could also mean the capacity we have to perceive that idea, to ‘summon up’ the nature of God (the innate idead of God). Or it could mean the actual act of perception when we do ‘summon up’ that nature (the innate ideam of God). These three senses are complementary.33 To have an objectively existing idea is to have the capacity to perceive it, for it surely makes no sense to speak of our having an idea in the objective sense that we could never perceive. Any nature that exists objectively in the intellect is such that it can be perceived; since the perceivability of the idea and the ability to perceive that idea are interdependent, ideas in the objective sense and ideas qua capacities are interdependent. Moreover, the capacity to perceive an idea is also related to the act of perceiving it, just as any capacity and the exercise of that capacity are related. In his letter to Hyperaspistes, then, Descartes is suggesting that to have an ideao of God entails that we have ‘an aptitude to perceive it explicitly.’ This is also his meaning in the passage already cited from the Conversation with Burman; infants can be said to have an innate idea of God because they have a capacity to perceive that idea. And that Descartes held this view can be inferred from this passage from the Fifth Meditation: it is not necessary that I ever light upon any thought of God; but whenever I do choose to think of the first and supreme being, and bring forth the idea of God from the treasure house of my mind as it were, it is necessary that I attribute all perfections to him, even if I do not at that time enumerate them or attend to them individually. (CSM II 46/AT VII 67) Although the idea of God is innate, it is possible that the meditator might never ‘light upon’ that idea or bring it forth ‘from the treasure house of his mind.’ Thus, although it is not true that every ideao must have a corresponding actual ideam, it is true that for every ideao, we must have a corresponding aptitude or disposition to perceive that ideao.


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If we take Descartes to be occasionally speaking of our capacity to perceive innate ideas in the objective sense, then dispositional language seems quite appropriate. In the letter to Hyperaspistes and in his characterization of innate ideas as the ‘faculty of summoning up’ ideas in the Replies to Hobbes, Descartes is describing our capacity to perceive ideas in the objective sense. Since to have this capacity to perceive such an idea requires that one possess an idea in the objective sense, he is describing what it means to say someone ‘has’ innate ideas before those ideas have been perceived. But, from another perspective, the present but submerged account is also correct. It explains the fact that ideas in the objective sense are not actually perceived by infants: there are objects actually existing objectively in the intellect, but because these ideas can be blocked by sensory ideas, they are not always perceived. To have an idea in the objective sense implies the possession of a capacity to perceive that object; so to say that some idea in the objective sense is impeded by the presence of sensory ideas is also to say that our capacity to perceive that object is impeded. Thus whether or not we describe a blocked idea as an impeded capacity to perceive that idea or as an actually present but submerged idea depends on whether we are considering it as an idea in the objective sense or as an idea in the sense of a capacity to perceive. My suggestion that Cottingham’s reading is ultimately compatible with a dispositional view should not be taken to mean that I endorse all the details of Cottingham’s account. In fact, I think that Cottingham’s argument for his own reading is flawed. Because Cottingham believes the two views are incompatible, he mistakenly suggests that the evidence he cites in support of the ‘present but submerged’ account tells against the dispositional account. In fact, it does not. As I mentioned earlier, most of Cottingham’s evidence for his reading consists of passages describing how an infant’s innate ideas are ‘swamped’ because of the infant’s preoccupation with bodily thoughts. For example, Descartes asserts that ‘In our childhood the mind was so immersed in the body that although there was much that it perceived clearly, it never perceived anything distinctly’ (CSM I 208/AT VIIIA 22). As Cottingham reads passages like this one, bodily ideas obstruct our innate ideas, so that the mind does not notice the innate ideas. Since innate ideas are (in one sense) objects as they exist in the intellect and are thus perceivable even before we perceive them, Cottingham’s account explains how these ideas are not actually perceived by infants: the objectively existing but as-yet-unperceived innate objects are blocked by sensory ideas. And, indeed, this is correct; but, as I have said, it is also correct to say that what is blocked is our capacity

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to perceive those ideas. In the passage just quoted, for example, it need not be only the ‘submerged’ innate ideas which are blocked. The inability of a child to perceive innate ideas distinctly can be due to a blocked capacity, that is, to a capacity which for some reason cannot yet be properly exercised. Since the passages Cottingham cites concerning infants’ innate ideas being blocked are actually compatible with the dispositional account, they cannot be evidence that Descartes held the ‘present but submerged’ view rather than the dispositional view. As we saw earlier, Cottingham also says that his interpretation is suggested by Descartes’ remarks that the mind can think of more than one thing at a time ‘provided that one thought does not obstruct another’—but such obstruction does occur in infancy, Descartes says (CSMK III 336/AT V 150). The characterization of thoughts as obstructing each other does suggest that the innate ideas are somehow already present in the infant, but not noticed. Interestingly, however, Descartes goes on to say that ‘The body is always a hindrance to the mind in its thinking, and this was especially true in youth,’ emphasizing here that the body interferes with the process of thinking. Again, Rule 4 from Rules for the Direction of the Mind says that the lack of a proper method will ‘blur the natural light and blind our intelligence’ (CSM I 16/AT X 371), and, in the Discourse on the Method, Descartes reports, ‘I gradually freed myself from many errors which may obscure our natural light and make us less capable of heeding reason’ (CSM I 116/AT VI 10). In these passages, it is the intellectual power of the natural light which Descartes is saying is obstructed, rather than the actual innate ideas themselves. Cottingham, then, reads Descartes as saying that our bodily ideas obstruct our innate ideas, so that the mind simply does not notice the innate ideas. But since another interpretation is possible (that our bodily ideas obstruct our faculty or power to perceive our innate ideas), and since this fact can be explained on accounts other than the ‘present but submerged account,’ and since Descartes does frequently speak of innate ideas as faculties, Cottingham has not established his claim that Descartes held that account rather than any other. Instead, as we have seen, the present-but-submerged account is compatible with the dispositional account.

1.4 The Recollection Account We have now examined several interpretations of Cartesian innateness from the secondary literature, and I have argued that these are unsatisfactory, either because they cannot explain certain passages or because they treat


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Descartes as inconsistent or confused. The unified account I have been defending can make sense of Descartes’ disparate characterizations of innateness by taking ‘innate idea’ to be ambiguous between three interrelated senses. Yet there are two more accounts of Cartesian innateness in the secondary literature which should be considered. One of these is what Robert McRae calls the ‘modified anamnesis’ theory, or the ‘recollection’ account; the other is what he calls the ‘reflective’ account. In this section I will consider the recollection account. I will discuss the reflective account in Chapter 3, where I modify and develop McRae’s suggestion that a thinker perceives innate ideas through reflection on his or her thoughts. The reflective account, I will argue, is not a distinct theory of innateness, but can be incorporated into the tripartite account of innateness already developed in this chapter. Similarly, the recollection account that McRae identifies is not a separate theory of innateness at all. According to McRae’s interpretation, the ‘recollection’ theory treats innateness, at least in some cases, as a matter of being logically entailed by some other idea. McRae apparently holds that the recollection theory of innateness applies only to the ideas of the geometrical shapes which extension can take and to the geometrical truths which Descartes takes to be implicit in and logically entailed by those shapes.34 The passage in which McRae finds the ‘recollection’ sense of ‘innate’ is from the Fifth Meditation, where the meditator says that there are countless particular features regarding shape, number, motion and so on, which I perceive when I give them my attention. And the truth of these matters is so open and so much in harmony with my nature, that on first discovering them it seems that I am not so much learning something new as remembering [reminisci] what I knew before; or it seems like noticing for the first time things which were long present within me although I had never turned my mental gaze on them before. (CSM II 44/AT VII 63–4) This passage does indeed echo both the Platonic and Augustinian doctrines of recollection. In the Meno, Plato asserts that ‘searching and learning are, as a whole, recollection,’ for ‘the soul has learned everything’;35 Descartes alludes to the Meno and its ‘doctrine of reminiscence’ in a letter to Voetius (CSMK III 222–3/AT VIIIB 167). And in On the Trinity, Augustine writes that in the hidden recesses of the mind there is a certain knowledge of certain things, and . . . when we think of them, they then proceed, as it were, to

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the center and are placed, so to speak, more clearly in the sight of the mind, for then the mind itself discovers that it remembers, understands, and loves those things of which it was not even thinking when it was thinking of something else.36 Augustine speaks of these truths as residing in the ‘memory,’37 and he also states that ‘what is called learning is nothing else than remembering and recalling,’38 although he states explicitly that his use of the language of remembering should not be taken as endorsement of the Platonic doctrine of the soul’s pre-existence.39 In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes does not go so far as to commit himself to a Platonic-style recollection doctrine; he simply says that it ‘seems’ he is remembering something known before and noticing something long present but unnoticed. But his allusion to the recollection doctrine is unsurprising when we think of innate ideas in the objective sense, which can be, Descartes thinks, ‘long present’ even though one has not yet turned one’s ‘mental gaze’ on them. I think this passage is interesting, then, not because it suggests a wholly new sense of ‘innate,’ but because it provides a useful metaphor for the perception of innate ideas in the objective sense. Although McRae calls the conception of innateness which he finds in the Fifth Meditation a modified version of the recollection doctrine put forward by Socrates in the Meno, the fact that Descartes says that perceiving truths about shape, number, and motion is like remembering is only of interest to McRae insofar as it seems related to an interpretation of the Meno proposed by Gregory Vlastos. McRae cites the following passage from Vlastos’ ‘Anamnesis in the Meno’: Reduced to its simplest terms what Plato means by ‘recollection’ in the Meno is any enlargement of our knowledge which results from the perception of logical relationships. When these are inter-propositional to ‘recollect’ a previously unknown proposition is to come to know it by seeing that it is entailed by others already known. Or if the relations are intrapropositional, as in the case of the true answer to the ‘What is X?’ question, then to ‘recollect’ is to gain insight into the logical structure of a concept, so that when faced with its correct definition one will see the concepts mentioned are analytically connected.40 McRae argues that when Descartes says that the ideas and truths of mathematics and geometry are innate, he means that they are logically entailed by the notion of extension (which McRae mistakenly believes is itself not innate).41


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Now, Descartes does indeed think that some innate ideas are in some sense implied by other ideas. As we shall see in later chapters, truths perceived by the natural light are truths which spell out further features of purely intellectual and common simple natures (including, in some cases, relationships between those natures), while mathematical truths are also implied by the concepts in which they are ‘contained.’ But it is unclear why McRae thinks this claim about the logical entailment of certain innate ideas should be particularly associated with recollection. That is, why should this type of innateness be more appropriately characterized as like remembering or like noticing something previously unnoticed than any other account of innateness? Surely a dispositional account of innateness could also be characterized using a metaphor of remembering; in coming to perceive some innate idea which was previously only potentially perceived, one might say that this experience was like remembering something long forgotten. A reflective account, too (to be examined in Chapter 3) could easily be cast in such terms: for turning one’s attention to one’s own mental contents, and discovering ideas there that one had never noticed before, might well seem like remembering or ‘noticing for the first time things which were long present within me although I had never turned my mental gaze on them before.’ Consider, for example, the following passage from Augustine’s On the Trinity, which seems to characterize something like a reflective account in terms of recollection: Wherefore, as in past things, that is called memory which makes it possible for them to be recalled and remembered, so in a present thing, which the mind is to itself, that is not unreasonably to be called memory, by which the mind is present to itself, so that it can be understood by its own thought.42 In fact, McRae explicitly states that the recollection simile is not appropriate to the reflective account of innateness.43 But it seems to me that his only reason for this denial is that he takes the recollection account to be equivalent to a view of innate ideas as those which are logically entailed by the idea of extension; and this is simply dogmatism. Moreover, I do not think Descartes considered the innateness of mathematical truths to be significantly different from the innateness of purely intellectual and common natures. In both cases, we will see, he thought one idea can be said to be implicit in another, and discoverable by reflection on the idea which ‘contains’ the other. In other words, what McRae identifies as a separate account of innateness, according to which some ideas are

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logically entailed by others, is treated by Descartes as another form of the reflective account.44 I shall say more about this in Chapter 6. In sum, McRae’s account of what he considers to be a separate sense of ‘innate’ is off track in several ways. Insofar as this account is primarily characterized by its invocation of logical relations among ideas, calling it a ‘modified version of anamnesis’ is misleading, since other views about innateness could just as well be cast in those terms. And neither the metaphor of recollection nor the invocation of logical entailments indicate a separate account of innateness; there is no additional ‘recollection’ account of innate ideas, and no additional ‘logical entailment’ account of innate ideas. Despite these problems with his reading, McRae has identified two important points: first, that Descartes alludes to the doctrines of recollection to be found in Plato and Augustine; second, that some of our innate ideas are about the relationships between other innate ideas. More specifically, as we shall see in later chapters, these innate truths include both mathematical propositions and those propositions that Descartes says are perceived by the natural light. I shall argue, however, that the sort of ‘logical entailment’ McRae describes is not, in fact, a new account of innateness, but should be treated within the unified conception of innate ideas that I have been proposing.

1.5 Conclusion I have argued that we need not resort to the uncharitable interpretations so far favored in the secondary literature, which take Descartes to be presenting either several unrelated conceptions of innateness, or a purely dispositional account. The three interdependent senses of ‘innate idea’ which I have identified allow for a unified account of the presence of innate ideas in a thinker’s mind; such ideas can be described as dispositions, but they can also appropriately be described as present but submerged. It is true that Descartes himself never comments on the fact that there are these various ways of understanding ‘innate idea.’ But the distinctions follow from his distinction between material and objective senses of ‘idea,’ and from the fact that he sometimes speaks of our innate ideas as a faculty or capacity and sometimes as actual perceptions. And drawing these distinctions allows us to make sense of the wide range of remarks he makes about innate ideas.


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I have also suggested that what McRae takes to be yet another sense of ‘innate,’ on which innate ideas are those that are logically entailed by others, does not constitute a separate account of innateness. Nor does Descartes’ reference to recollection indicate a new account of innateness; the Fifth Meditation passage in which he refers to ‘remembering’ can be explained when we note that one sense of ‘innate idea’ is ‘idea in the objective sense,’ the object of thought that can exist in the intellect even though it is unperceived.

Chapter 2

Innate Ideas as Objects and Acts

According to the interpretation developed in the previous chapter, ‘innate idea’ is triply ambiguous: a Cartesian innate idea can either be an object of thought, an act of perception, or a capacity to perceive certain objects of thought. I argued for this triple ambiguity on the basis of Descartes’ distinction in the Preface to the Meditations between ideas in the objective sense and ideas in the material sense, and on the basis of various remarks in which Descartes characterizes innate ideas as dispositions or faculties. In this chapter, I address how distinguishing between innate ideas as acts of thought (ideasm) and innate ideas as objects of thought (ideaso) might have implications for other aspects of Descartes’ theory of innate ideas. In particular, I will be examining Descartes’ distinction between innate and adventitious ideas, and his account of clarity and distinctness. In several texts, Descartes links the source of our innate ideas with our nature as thinking beings, writing that innate ideas are those that come from ‘no other source than myself’ (CSM II 96/AT VII 133), and suggesting that this marks them off from adventitious and factitious ideas. This Cartesian claim will be the focus of Section 1. As we shall see, in characterizing innate ideas as coming from his nature as a thinking thing, Descartes is referring to innate ideas in the material sense (innate ideasm), because innate ideas in the objective sense (innate ideaso) come not from his nature but from God; in Descartes’ view, innate ideaso are eternal natures which have objective being in the intellect. In Section 2 I explore what we can learn from the Third Meditation about Descartes’ distinctions between innate, factitious, and adventitious ideas. I also consider whether we should, as some commentators have concluded, take Descartes to be retracting the distinction between innate and adventitious ideas in his Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, where he makes the startling claim that ‘there is nothing in our ideas which is not innate to the mind or the faculty of thinking, with the sole exception of those circumstances which relate to experience’ (CSM I 304/AT VIIIB 358). I argue that,


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in fact, Descartes retains his distinction even in that puzzling work. The key to understanding the Comments, I suggest, is to take ideas of pure intellect to be paradigm examples of innate ideas for Descartes, and adventitious ideas to be innate to a lesser degree. Finally, in Section 3, I show how Descartes’ views about the clarity and distinctness of innate ideas should be interpreted once we have taken note of the distinction between innate ideas as acts of thought (ideasm) and innate ideas as objects of thought (ideaso).

2.1 The Role of the Meditator’s Nature In the Meditations, there are two passages which specifically address the issue of what it is for an idea to be innate. In the first passage, the meditator divides his ideas into the innate, the adventitious, and the factitious. He announces, ‘for that I understand what a thing is, what truth is, what thought is, I seem to have these things from no other place than from my nature itself’1 (my translation; AT VII 38). The second passage occurs later in the Third Meditation, where the meditator says that his idea of God must be innate, since ‘it has never come to me unexpectedly’ and ‘it was not invented by me; for I am plainly unable to take away anything from it or to add anything to it’ (CSM II 35/AT VII 51). In this section, I will focus on what these Third Meditation passages tell us about Cartesian innate ideas. In particular, I will focus on their suggestion that innate ideas seem to come from a thinker’s own nature. According to the first passage, the meditator’s ‘understanding’ of what a thing, truth, and thought are ‘seems to derive simply from [his] own nature.’ Since he has just distinguished between innate, adventitious, and ‘made up’ ideas, and he contrasts his understanding of thing, truth, and thought with his hearing a noise and with thinking of a siren or hippogriff, there should be no doubt that his ideas of thing, truth, and thought are meant to fall into the category of the innate. But the passage raises a number of perplexing questions. What does the meditator mean by his ‘nature’? Is he suggesting that all his innate ideas seem to come from his nature alone, or does this account apply only to his innate ideas of thing, truth, and thought? What does it mean for an understanding to ‘come from’ his nature? And is it significant that he says that his understanding only ‘seems’ to come from his own nature? The first thing to notice is that Descartes makes a very similar claim about innate ideas in the Comments on a Certain Broadsheet. He has just distinguished

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between the ‘remote and merely accidental cause’ of an idea on the one hand, and its ‘proximate and efficient cause’ on the other, and he points out that although ‘verbal instruction or observation of things’ might lead us to attend to our idea of God, such instruction or observation can only give the mind ‘utterances and pictures,’ and that ‘everything over and above these utterances and pictures which we think of as being signified by them is represented to us by means of ideas which come to us from no other source than our own faculty of thinking’ (CSM I 305/AT VIIIB 360–1). The Latin here is strikingly like that of the Third Meditation passage: in the Third Meditation, he writes of his understanding of thing, truth and thought that ‘non aliunde habere videor quàm ab ipsâmet meâ naturâ,’ while in the Comments he writes that the ideas (of such things as God) ‘non aliunde adventientes quàm à nostrâ cogitandi facultate.’ In the former passage he speaks of innate ideas coming from no place but his own nature; in the latter, he speaks of these ideas as coming from his faculty of thought. This is because his nature is his faculty of thought. And even in the Third Meditation, the meditator has the resources to recognize that this is so, for he has established, in the Second Meditation, that he is a ‘thing that thinks,’ that is, ‘a thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions’ (CSM II 19/AT VII 28). Thus when he says in the Third Meditation that his understanding of thing, truth, and thought seems to come only from his own nature, he also understands that this means that they seem to come from his nature as a thinking thing. However, at this point in the Meditations, his nature as a thinking thing is understood quite broadly, as including sense-perception and imagination in addition to the strictly intellectual attributes of mind. Although imagination and sense-perception may seem to require a body, the meditator explicitly says, both in the Second and Third Meditations, that he can understand them in a way that refers to them only as modes of thought and which does not require that he have a body or that any external objects exist (CSM II 19/AT VII 29 and CSM II 24/AT VII 34). Thus imagination and senseperception, insofar as they are types of thinking, are part of the meditator’s nature as he understands it in the Third Meditation. It is only in the Sixth Meditation that the meditator discovers that senseperception and imagination are non-essential to his nature. The meditator realizes there that because imagination and sense-perception bear the same relation to the self as modes bear to the thing in which they inhere, he ‘can clearly and distinctly understand [himself] as a whole without these faculties’ (CSM II 54/AT VII 78). In the Principles, Descartes distinguishes


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between essential attributes, which are qualities of a substance ‘without which the substance is unintelligible’ (CSM I 214/AT VIIIA 30), and modes, which are qualities of a substance without which we can still clearly perceive that substance (CSM I 214/AT VIIIA 29). In the Sixth Meditation, then, the meditator is suggesting that imagination and sense-perception are modes, not essential attributes, of thought; the nature of the self, strictly speaking, is pure intellect, mind without imagination or sensation.2 However, the meditator has not yet realized this in the Third Meditation; there, he considers sensing and imagining to be as much a part of his nature as the pure intellect is. And this fact may seem to present a problem for the meditator’s attempt to distinguish between adventitious and innate ideas. If innate ideas are those that seem to come simply from the meditator’s own nature, and the meditator is, at this point, including the faculties of sense-perception and imagination in his nature, then wouldn’t ideas which derive from those faculties—ideas which he wants to say are, respectively, adventitious and factitious—thereby count as innate? But this is not, in fact, a problem. Recall that the meditator says of his innate perceptions of thing, truth, and thought, ‘I seem to have these things from no other place than from my nature itself.’ Concerning adventitious perception, on the other hand, he says, ‘my hearing a noise, as I do now, or seeing the sun, or feeling the fire, comes from things which are located outside me, or so I have hitherto judged’ (CSM II 26/AT VII 38). Descartes thus stresses a contrast between perceptions that seem to come only from his nature, and perceptions that seem to come from some other place— namely, from external objects. Ultimately, in the Sixth Meditation, the meditator will provide a mechanistic account of sense-perception, according to which external objects cause our sense organs to move, which in turn causes ‘animal spirits’ to move in our nerves, which cause movements of the pineal gland.3 But when the meditator first speaks of innate ideas in the Third Meditation, this picture is not yet in place. The only other candidate at this point is the scholastic account, according to which images are in the mind because the forms of objects have been transmitted into the mind directly from the objects themselves. Even though the meditator does not know for sure whether the perceptions that he thinks come from external objects really do have such a source, some perceptions seem to come from external objects, whereas he seems to possess his perceptions of innate ideas ‘from no other place than [his] own nature.’ And this is enough of a basis for the meditator’s distinction, at this point in the Meditations, between adventitious ideas and innate ideas.

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Of course, by the end of the Meditations, the meditator will realize that adventitious ideas themselves are not transmitted by objects. Rather, they are occasioned or caused in him by the movements of the pineal gland,4 which themselves are caused by the animal spirits moving through the nerves. But this fact does not really affect the distinction between the adventitious and the innate that the meditator has expressed in the early part of the Third Meditation; on his Sixth Meditation view of how we acquire adventitious ideas, the causal chain which ends in an adventitious perception is, typically, started by some external object, even if what that object transmits is not the idea itself but a physical movement which eventually causes (or occasions) the mind to have the perception. In a passage which echoes the grammatical structure of his earlier claim about innate ideas, he says that God would have to be a deceiver if the adventitious ideas ‘were transmitted from a source other than corporeal beings [si aliunde quàm a rebus corporeis emitterentur]’ (CSM II 55/AT VII 80). On both the earlier and later views of the meditator, adventitious ideas are partly caused by the mind itself, insofar as they are ideas and thus modes of thought, but they are nonetheless also partly caused by the external objects which we tend to think they resemble, and, furthermore, they seem to us to be so caused.5 Our innate perceptions, on the other hand, do not seem to come from anything but our own natures as thinking things. I have been arguing that when the meditator says that ‘My understanding of what a thing is, what truth is, and what thought is, seems to derive simply from my own nature,’ he means that his understanding of these innate ideas seems to him to have no source but his nature as a thinking thing. Although he understands his nature to include sensation and imagination, any ‘understanding’ which comes from sensation and imagination will also seem to have another source, namely external objects, and thus will not count as an understanding of an innate idea. Innate ideas thus include only perceptions that he seems to have through the use of pure intellect alone. I have been speaking of the meditator’s ‘understanding’ of innate ideas because that is how the meditator himself puts the point, but we must get clearer about what he means by an ‘understanding.’ The meditator’s characterization of his ‘understanding’ of these things as coming from his own nature suggests that he is speaking of ideas in the material sense, of the mental operation of perceiving innate ideas rather than of the ideas in the objective sense. It will not be difficult to make out how an actual perception of an innate idea can be said to come only from one’s nature as a thinking thing, for, as we shall see in Chapter 3, such perceptions consist in the mental act of


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reflecting on or attending to one’s thoughts, and this reflection is carried out by the pure intellect. The meditator’s actual perceptions of his innate ideas ‘come from’ his nature because only the pure intellect is involved in reflection.6 Thus it is those operations of the intellect by which the meditator perceives his innate ideaso that can properly be said to come from the meditator’s own nature. The innate ideas in the objective sense themselves do not come from his own nature; they come from God, who created his nature to be such that he possesses those ideas. Nor can his capacity to perceive innate ideas be said to come from his nature as a thinking thing. The meditator’s capacity to perceive innate ideas is his nature, rather than some further capacity that is somehow generated or produced by his nature as a thinking thing. If this capacity is his nature, then it doesn’t make sense to claim that the capacity comes from his nature. Indeed, there is an important reason why we cannot read Descartes as making such a claim. In the Third Meditation, Descartes’ proof for the existence of God turns on the claim that his idea of God possesses more objective reality than he himself could confer on an idea; there must therefore be a God who causes him to have that idea. In the First Set of Replies, Descartes stresses to Caterus that his actual perception of the innate idea of God (that is, his perception of God as God exists objectively in the meditator’s intellect, his perception of the innate ideao of God) need not be caused by God; the actual perception is an operation of the intellect, and thus can be adequately explained simply as having come from his nature as a thinking thing. Descartes tells Caterus that there is no problem with postulating human thinkers as the cause of their operations of thought. However, merely human thinkers cannot cause the objective contents of thought when those contents have more objective reality than the formal reality of the thinkers. Descartes suggests that ‘if someone possesses in his intellect the idea of a machine of a highly intricate design, it is perfectly fair to ask what is the cause of this idea’ (CSM II 75/AT VII 103). He writes that we cannot answer that ‘the intellect itself is the cause of the idea, in so far as it is the cause of its own operations; for what is at issue is not this, but the cause of the objective intricacy which is in the idea’ (CSM II 75/AT VII 103). I have already argued that to possess some idea in the objective sense entails that we have a capacity to perceive it; thus in seeking the cause of the objective existence of some thing, we are, in essence, seeking to explain how we have the capacity to perceive that thing. In the example of the intricate machine, Descartes suggests that ‘there could be various causes’ of the objective reality of the idea, and two that he suggests are

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clearly explanations of our capacity to conceive of the machine: one might have ‘an extensive knowledge of mechanics,’ or ‘a very subtle intelligence which enables him to invent the idea without any previous knowledge’ (CSM II 76/AT VII 104). Descartes then turns to a discussion of the idea of God, stressing that the capacity to perceive the innate idea of God can only come from God: Because the idea of God is implanted in the same way in the minds of all, we do not notice it coming into our minds from any external source, and so we suppose it belongs to the nature of our own intellect. This is correct enough, but we forget something else which is a most important consideration—indeed one on which the entire luminous power of the argument depends—namely that this ability to have within us the idea of God could not belong to our intellect if the intellect were simply a finite entity (as indeed it is) and did not have God as its cause. (CSM II 76–7/AT VII 105–6; my emphasis) If the capacity to perceive the ideao of God came from the meditator’s own nature, then the meditator could not use the objective reality of that idea to establish that God must exist. He stresses this point again in the Second Set of Replies, writing that ‘it would be impossible for me to have the power of forming this idea [of God] unless I were created by God’ (CSM II 96/AT VII 133). It is the idea of God in the objective sense that concerns the meditator when he returns to the topic of innate ideas at the end of Third Meditation. He writes: It only remains for me to examine how I received this idea from God. For I did not acquire it by the senses; it has never come to me unexpectedly, as usually happens with the ideas of things that are perceivable by the senses, when these things present themselves to the external sense organs—or seem to do so. And it was not invented by me either; for I am plainly unable either to take anything away from it or to add anything to it. The only remaining alternative is that it is innate in me, just as the idea of myself is innate in me. (CSM II 35/AT VII 51) The meditator cannot here be speaking of innate ideas in the material sense, the operation by which a nature is perceived, for it is possible to take away or add features to such perceivings; as we shall see later in this chapter, one way our perceptions can fail to be distinct is because we add something


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to the perception which is not present in the nature itself. What cannot be added to or subtracted from are ideas in the objective sense, as Descartes makes clear in the Fifth Set of Replies: An idea represents the essence of a thing, and if anything is added to or taken away from the essence, then the idea automatically becomes the idea of something else. This is how the ideas of Pandora and of all false Gods are formed by those who do not have a correct conception of the true God. But once the idea of the true God has been conceived, although we may detect additional perfections in him which we had not yet noticed, this does not mean that we have augmented the idea of God; we have simply made it more distinct and explicit, since, so long as we suppose that our original idea was a true one, it must have contained all these perfections. (CSM II 256/AT VII 371) As I read this passage, Descartes is saying that while everyone has an idea of the true God, not everyone ‘conceives’ this idea correctly; some people add features to their conception which the true God does not really have, or they ‘subtract’ features by not including in their conception features which God does have. This means that the idea in the material sense (what I have been calling the perception but here could be called the conception) is of something other than what they take it to be of: they think they have a perception of the true God, but in fact it is of a false God. But the nature of God himself can never be altered. Thus I take it that when the meditator says that he cannot add anything to or subtract anything from his idea of God, he is speaking of his idea in the objective sense, of God himself as he exists in the meditator’s mind. It is worth pausing at this point to say more about Descartes’ views regarding the natures which God has caused to exist in the human intellect. In a letter to Mersenne of 1641, Descartes characterizes innate ideas as those which ‘represent true, immutable and eternal essences [quae aliquas Essentias Veras, Immutabiles & Aeternas representant]’ (CSMK III 183/AT III 383). More typically, however, Descartes refers to ‘natures’ rather than to ‘essences.’ An innate idea in the objective sense is the objective presence of one of these eternal natures or essences; it is one of these natures itself as it exists in the mind, whether perceived or unperceived. As I discussed in the Introduction to this book, Descartes addresses such ‘natures,’ both simple and complex, in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind. And while the language of simple and complex natures does not appear in the Meditations, similar language recurs in the later Principles of Philosophy,

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suggesting that Descartes probably still held these views at the time of the Meditations. The three classes of simple natures include the purely intellectual, the purely material, and the ‘common’ simples. As I have said, these characterizations pertain both to the objects in which the simples inhere, and to the means by which we know the simples: the purely intellectual simples, such as knowledge, doubt, ignorance, and volition, are not only modes of something purely mental (mind), but are also perceivable through thought alone. Natures like shape, extension, and motion ‘are recognized to be present only in bodies,’ and, I will argue, require some kind of corporeal image in order to be perceived.7 The common simples, which can be ‘ascribed indifferently, now to corporeal things, now to spirits,’ can be known ‘either by the pure intellect or by the intellect as it intuits the images of material things’ (CSM I 44–5/AT X 419–20). Descartes’ examples of common simples include not only non-propositional concepts such as existence, unity, and duration, but also propositional ‘common notions,’ which he describes in the Rules as ‘links which connect other simple natures together’ (CSM I 45/AT X 419). Descartes holds that natures—and, of course, their counterpart ideas in the objective sense—are linked through relationships of containment. He also sometimes says that certain features ‘pertain to’ natures. For example, in the Second Meditation, the meditator says that nothing he can think of with his imagination pertains to [pertinere] his knowledge of himself (CSM II 19/AT VII 28), and in examining the wax he says he is taking away what does not pertain to [pertinent] it (CSM II 20/AT VII 31). In the Fifth Meditation he says that existence pertains to [pertinere] the nature of God, and that various properties can pertain to [pertinere] the natures of shapes (CSM II 45/AT VII 65). In the Principles, he says that it is ‘necessarily contained [contineri] in the idea of a triangle that its three angles should equal two right angles’ and that ‘necessary and eternal existence is contained [contineri] in the idea of a supremely perfect being’ (CSM I 198/AT VIIIA 10).8 Similarly, in the Second Set of Replies, he writes: I ask [my readers] to examine the ideas of those natures which contain a combination of many attributes, such as the nature of a triangle, or of a square, or of any other figure, as well as the nature of mind, the nature of body, and above all the nature of God, or the supremely perfect being. And they should notice that whatever we perceive to be contained in these natures can be truly affirmed of them. For example, the fact that its


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three angles are equal to two right angles is contained in the nature of a triangle. (CSM II 115/AT VII 163) This passage gives a clue to what Descartes means when he says that some natures pertain to or are contained by others: here, natures are said to contain a combination [complexio] of attributes. In the Rules, Descartes also characterizes the triangle as a ‘mixture or compounding’ of simple natures: For example, I can have knowledge of a triangle, even though it has never occurred to me that this knowledge involves knowledge also of the angle, the line, the number three, shape, extension, etc. But that does not preclude our saying that the nature of a triangle is composed of these other natures and that they are better known than the triangle, for it is just these natures that we understand to be present in it. Perhaps there are many additional natures implicitly contained in the triangle which escape our notice, such as the size of the angles being equal to two right angles, the innumerable relations between the sides and the angles, the size of its surface area, etc. (CSM I 46/AT X 422) What a triangle, contains, then, are the simple natures that, when combined, constitute a triangle. Descartes also proposes something like a test for whether some simple nature actually is contained in another nature.9 He says, even if I can understand what a triangle is if I abstract the fact that its three angles are equal to two right angles, I cannot deny that this property applies to the triangle by a clear and distinct operation—that is, while at the same time understanding what I mean by my denial. (CSM II 84/ AT VII 117–8) Although Descartes does not actually say that it would be a contradiction to deny of a triangle that its three angles are equal to two right angles, he does suggest that this denial cannot be coherently maintained; if one can never understand the denial, then that must be, for Descartes, because it is inherently inconceivable. So, nature A (or an idea in the objective sense of nature A) can be said to ‘contain’ nature B (or the idea in the objective sense of B) if one can never consistently deny that B is a property belonging to A.

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We are now in a position to sum up what the Third Meditation reveals about innate ideas: generally speaking, innate ideas are those ideas which we have a capacity to perceive because God has created our nature such that we have a capacity of pure intellect. Another way of putting this point is to say that God has stocked our minds with innate ideas in the objective sense, which are eternal natures or essences present in the mind even before they are actually perceived. As we shall see in greater detail in later chapters, the actual perception of these objectively existing natures comes from the faculty of pure intellect as it attends to various thoughts.

2.2 Distinguishing the Innate from the Adventitious and the Factitious The Third Meditation also suggests a way to distinguish between innate ideas, adventitious ideas, and factitious ideas. As we have seen, Descartes holds that adventitious ideas seem to come from some other source besides the pure intellect; they seem to have been caused to be present in us by some external object. And because of this, they do not seem to derive from our nature alone. Adventitious ideas, or sense-perceptions,10 might plausibly be said to be in us due to our nature if we take nature to mean ‘the combination of mind and body.’ Indeed, in the Sixth Meditation the meditator identifies just such a sense of ‘nature’ (CSM II 57/AT VII 82), and in that sense, sense-perception is natural. But the most important sense of ‘nature’ for Descartes includes just the pure intellect, for he repeatedly insists that he can imagine himself as a whole without every other faculty or quality, but not without pure intellect (CSM II 54/AT VII 78). In this sense of ‘nature,’ he does not have adventitious ideas because of his nature. The third type of idea which the meditator identifies in the Third Meditation is that of ‘invented [a me ipso factae]’ ideas (CSM II 26/AT VII 38), but Descartes has little to say about them. Descartes’ examples, of his ideas of sirens and hippogriffs, suggest that factitious ideas are compositions of ideas that seem to come to him through the senses, and thus that factitious ideas are parasitic on adventitious ideas. If that is so, then the factitious ideas, like the adventitious ideas, would not be present in us due solely to our nature as thinking things, for they would also require sensation and imagination. However, consider the meditator’s idea of the evil genius in the First Meditation. This is surely a factitious idea, one which the meditator has composed by altering some qualities in his idea of God, so that the imagined demon, though similar to God in being ‘of the utmost power and


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cunning’ is not ‘supremely good and the source of truth,’ but rather ‘malicious’ (CSM II 15/AT VII 22). Here is a factitious idea which has been composed, it seems, out of innate ideas, not adventitious ideas.11 And if the ability to combine innate ideas is a feature of pure intellect—and surely there is no good reason why it shouldn’t be—then it seems that we can produce some factitious ideas by virtue of our own nature as thinking beings. Thus it seems that the difference between factitious and innate ideas is less clear than the meditator’s initial characterization of the three types of ideas suggests. It is worth noting that the meditator draws those initial distinctions with some hesitation, stating that ‘perhaps all my ideas may be thought of as adventitious, or they all may be innate, or all made up; for as yet I have not clearly perceived their true origin’ (CSM II 26/AT VII 38). So one may be led to think that Descartes does not actually endorse the distinctions. However, at the end of the Third Meditation the meditator seems ready to endorse the view that there really are three distinct types of ideas. Earlier we examined the meditator’s claim that his idea of God is innate in order to determine which sense of ‘innate idea’ is at play; now it is worth considering the same passage for what it tells us about the contrast between the innate, the adventitious, and the factitious: It only remains for me to examine how I received this idea from God. For I did not acquire it by the senses; it has never come to me unexpectedly, as usually happens with the ideas of things that are perceivable by the senses, when these things present themselves to the external sense organs—or seem to do so. And it was not invented by me either; for I am plainly unable either to take anything away from it or to add anything to it. The only remaining alternative is that it is innate in me, just as the idea of myself is innate in me. (CSM II 35/AT VII 51) This passage adds another element to the characterization of adventitious ideas from earlier in the Third Meditation: not only do adventitious ideas seem to come to us from external objects, but they also typically come to us ‘unexpectedly.’ Innate ideas thus differ from the adventitious in these two ways: they do not seem to come from anything other than our own faculty of pure intellect, and they do not come to us unexpectedly. As we will see in Chapter 3, the perception of innate ideas requires that we turn our attention away from sense-perceptions, which requires a deliberate act of will; so these ideas will never come to us without our expecting them to.12

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But the creation of a factitious idea also requires an act of will, and thus some further criterion is needed to distinguish the factitious from the innate. What Descartes suggests here is that factitious ideas can have elements added to or taken away from them. Innate ideaso cannot be modified at all, since they just are true and immutable natures existing in the intellect in the way that objects can exist there. Innate ideasm can be modified; as we shall see, an innate idea in this sense is made more clear and distinct by including more of what is contained in the innate ideao (of which the innate ideam is a perception), and by excluding features not contained in the innate ideao. As Descartes says in the Principles, to form a clear and distinct idea of God, ‘we must not invent any additional features, but concentrate only on what is really contained in the idea and on what we clearly perceive to belong to the nature of a supremely perfect being’ (CSM I 211/ AT VIIIA 26). But one difference between factitious ideas in the material sense and innate ideas in the material sense is that altering the former does not affect the clarity and distinctness of the perception in the way that altering the latter does. I will return to the issue of clarity and distinctness at the end of this chapter. I have been arguing that Descartes does indeed distinguish between innate and adventitious ideas; the meditator’s reprisal of his threefold distinction of ideas at the end of the Third Meditation, appealing to new criteria which make the distinctions clearer, suggests that Descartes did in fact endorse the distinction. But a number of commentators have held that Descartes did not want to distinguish adventitious from innate ideas, and that in fact Descartes thought all ideas are really innate.13 In support of this reading, they invoke Descartes’ 1647 Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, a text which, at first glance anyway, does seem to retract the earlier distinction. Descartes says there that ‘there is nothing in our ideas which is not innate to the mind or the faculty of thinking, with the sole exception of those circumstances which relate to experience,’ and a little later he asserts that ‘the very ideas of the motions themselves and of the figures are innate in us,’ and that ‘the ideas of pain, colours, sounds and the like must be all the more innate [tantò magis innatae]’ (CSM I 304/AT VIIIB 358–9). Another reason one might think the Comments obscures the distinction between the innate and the adventitious is that Descartes seems to suggest there that to be innate it is enough to be a mere disposition; thus, it seems, there won’t be any ideas which aren’t innate, since all ideas can be described as thoughts we are disposed to have under certain conditions. Anthony Kenny takes this position, reading the Comments as showing that ‘No matter what X may be, the idea of X is innate in the sense that the capacity to think


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of X, imagine X, feel X, experience X is inborn in us and is not given by the stimulus that on a particular occasion makes us think of or experience X.’14 However, I think Kenny’s interpretation is mistaken. Even if Descartes wants to say that all ideas are in some sense innate (a claim which I will discuss in further detail below), it is not the case that he thinks that every idea is innate just because we have a capacity to think of it. In the Comments, Descartes has a particular reason for stressing the sense in which an innate idea can be a disposition: he wants to correct the misleading impression that the ‘Broadsheet’ published by his former pupil Regius gave concerning Descartes’ views on innate ideas. In article 12 of the ‘Broadsheet,’ Regius asserts that ‘The mind has no need of ideas, or notions, or axioms which are innate: its faculty of thinking is all it needs for performing its own acts’ (CSM I 295/AT VIIIB 345). Regius evidently thought, then, that Descartes held that innate ideas are always actual. Descartes naturally would have wanted to combat this view—but in claiming that innate ideas are dispositions, Descartes need not be taken as suggesting that an innate idea is no more than a disposition. Nor would he say that any disposition whatsoever counts as an innate idea; innate ideas in the dispositional sense are capacities to perceive certain objectively existing things, and not just capacities to have any idea whatsoever. Indeed, Descartes evidently does not want to say we have dispositions to have various adventitious ideas.15 To be sure, he does speak of sense-perception itself as a faculty (CSM II 54/AT VII 78 and CSM II 55/AT VII 79),16 and since he characterizes the faculty by which we perceive our innate ideas as a ‘disposition or faculty’ (CSM I 304/AT VIIIB 358), perhaps he should also say that our faculty of sense-perception is a disposition to perceive through the senses. If this is right, then just as I have dispositions to perceive the natures of God, truth, extension, and so on—assuming the right conditions are satisfied—then perhaps I also can be said to have dispositions to perceive the cherry tree in my backyard, the song playing on the radio, the taste of coffee, and so on (again assuming that the right conditions are satisfied). What seems to make the difference, for Descartes, is whether or not there is something which can give determinate content to the perception which results from the exercise of the disposition. Innate ideas in the objective sense provide a normative standard for innate ideas in the material sense. There is no such standard for the exercise of dispositions to have adventitious ideas, at least of secondary qualities. There is a way in which my senseperception of the cherry tree, song on the radio, or taste of coffee cannot be wrong, since Descartes thinks the secondary qualities we perceive

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through the senses are not really in the corporeal objects themselves. For such sense-perceptions there is no fact of the matter which can serve as a normative standard for the content of the idea in the material sense (the perception); for innate ideas, the ideao plays this role. Without such a standard, we cannot specify, in advance, what the disposition is a disposition for. Thus Descartes evidently thinks it is inappropriate to characterize senseperceptions that we haven’t yet had as specific dispositions or faculties. Thus there are good reasons to avoid Kenny’s reading of Descartes as holding that all ideas are innate because, for any idea, we can be said to have a capacity to think of that idea. Moreover, Descartes himself explicitly states that he does not think that all ideas are innate. Frans Burman himself read Descartes’ Comments on a Certain Broadsheet as claiming that all ideas are innate (CSMK III 347/AT V 165), but in the Conversation with Burman, Descartes denies this. He insists that he ‘does not say that all ideas are innate in him,’ reiterating his usual claim that some ideas are adventitious (CSMK I 347/AT V 165). And indeed, in the Comments itself he refers to his tripartite division of ideas; in the paragraph immediately preceding the one in which he says that ideas of pain, colors, sounds, figures and motions are innate, he writes: I have never written or taken the view that the mind requires innate ideas which are something distinct from its own faculty of thinking. I did, however, observe that there were certain thoughts within me which neither came to me from external objects nor were determined by my will, but which came solely from the power of thinking within me; so I applied the term ‘innate’ to the ideas or notions which are the forms of these thoughts in order to distinguish them from others, which I called ‘adventitious’ or ‘made up.’ (CSM I 304/AT VIIIB 357–8) There is no indication here or anywhere else in the Comments that Descartes is now giving up this tripartite division. So what is going on in the Comments, if Descartes is not saying that all ideas are innate? How can he retain a distinction between the innate and the adventitious, and yet claim that ideas of motions, figures, pain, colors, and sounds are innate? One explanation of Descartes’ apparent inconsistency is provided by Kenneth Winkler’s interpretation of innate ideas in his ‘Grades of Cartesian Innateness.’ On this reading, ‘innate’ always means ‘derived from my nature,’ but there is, as Winkler puts it, an ‘instability’ in the meditator’s understanding of ‘my nature,’ since there are wider and narrower senses of ‘my nature.’17 Winkler suggests that Descartes may claim in the Comments


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that ideas of pain, color, sounds, motions, and figures are innate because these things belong to our nature in the broader sense of ‘nature’ as a combination of mind and body.18 This interpretation requires reading Descartes as switching without comment between what he means by ‘innate’ within the space of two paragraphs, for we must take Descartes as saying first that innate ideas come just from the power of thinking—which we might gloss as ‘from his nature qua thinking thing’—and then that they come from his nature as a mind–body combination. Another possibility is that Descartes is operating with two different senses of ‘innate.’ This is the reading adopted by Tad Schmaltz, who writes: When Descartes claimed in the Notes that sensory ideas are innate, he meant merely that they are produced by a faculty of mind. This allows for the view that such ideas are adventitious in the sense that they arise from a mental faculty only when the mind is stimulated by certain bodily motions. When he stated that certain ideas are innate rather than adventitious or factitious, on the other hand, he meant to deny that such ideas arise either immediately upon particular sensory stimulation or by means of a voluntary contribution of elements supplied by sense experience.19 In a narrow sense of ‘innate,’ ideas are innate ‘when they derive from an intellectual faculty of mind rather than from sensory or volitional mental faculties,’ while they are innate in a broad sense ‘when they are produced by any sort of mental faculty.’20 Thus, as Schmaltz reads the Comments, when Descartes insists on the tripartite division of ideas, he is invoking the narrower sense of ‘innate,’ but when in the next paragraph he claims that ideas of motions, figures, sounds, and so on are innate, he is using ‘innate’ in a broader sense. Ideally, we would find an interpretation of Descartes’ claims in the Comments which does not require positing either two distinct senses of ‘innate’ or a single sense of ‘innate’ which equivocates between two different senses of ‘my nature.’ I think that such a reading is possible if we take it that innateness can come in degrees. On this reading, fully innate ideas are those which are apparently derived from the power of thought alone. That is, the ideas that seem to come from no external source will be truly innate. Nonetheless, to the extent that the power of thought plays some role in our possession of an idea, that idea could be considered as innate. But all ideas are present in us due at least partly to the power of thought; that’s what it means to say that ideas are operations of thought, after all.

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This reading can also accommodate Descartes’ rather peculiar claim that ‘the ideas of pain, colours, sounds and the like must be all the more innate’ (CSM I 304/AT VIIIB 359), more innate than our ideas of motions themselves and figures. The former group of ideas consists of secondary qualities, ideas of sense which, Descartes stresses in other texts, we cannot know to resemble their objects. The latter group consists of primary qualities, which Descartes thinks do exist in objects just as we perceive them. But it is perhaps surprising that Descartes asserts that ideas which may very well not resemble their objects are more innate than ideas which do resemble those objects. To say that a perception does not resemble its object is presumably to say that the perception is not clear and distinct. So if we can never know for certain whether some perception resembles its object, then that is to say that the perception is never clear and distinct. Yet the paradigm examples of innate ideas certainly can be clearly and distinctly perceived, Descartes thinks. So, if innateness really comes in degrees, we might expect the perceptions which can be known to resemble their objects—and thus which are presumably clear and distinct—to be more innate than those which don’t. So, why does Descartes say otherwise? I suggested in Section 1 of this chapter that innate ideas are those which seem to be present in us due to the power of thought alone. We have also seen that Descartes seems to endorse this position in the Comments when he characterizes innate ideas as those which ‘came solely from the power of thinking within me’ (CSM I 303/AT VIIIB 358). So, if innateness comes in degrees, then maximally innate ideas are those which depend entirely on the power of thinking— that is, they appear to come from no externally existing object. Ideas which are innate to a lesser degree, then, would be those which seem to be in us due partly to some external object. Finally, the least innate ideas would be those which seem to come to us entirely from an external object. They would count as innate insofar as all ideas, as modes of thought, are in us due at least partly to our power of thinking. But because they also seem to us to come from external objects, they would be only minimally innate. And, I suggest, the ideas that most obviously seem to come to us from external objects are the ideas that represent primary qualities, for we can be sure that those qualities are in the external objects. Since we cannot be sure that perceptions of colors, sounds, and other secondary qualities really resemble the external objects, we cannot be sure that external objects are causing those ideas. Thus, Descartes concludes, they are more innate than perceptions of primary qualities but less innate than perceptions of God and of oneself as a thinking thing.


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On this reading, the way in which adventitious ideas can legitimately be characterized as innate is not exactly the same way as that in which purely intellectual ideas are innate. The latter are innate because they seem to arise only from the power of thought, while the former are considered innate (to a lesser degree) because the power of thought makes some contribution to our possession of them. But I don’t think this means that ‘innateness-to-a-lesser-degree’ is altogether a different sense of ‘innate.’ To put this point in terms of the distinctions developed in the previous chapter, we might say that all ideas in the material sense are innate to some extent, since ideas in the material sense are operations of thought and thus, by definition, involve some contribution from the faculty of thought. Ideas in the material sense are less innate when there is also some apparent bodily contribution; thus, operations of thought that are occasioned by some movement of the pineal gland are innate to some extent, but are not fully or paradigmatically innate. The mark of a fully innate perception is that it does not seem to come to us from external objects, but rather from our power of thinking alone. This claim has to be made with some care, however. For I will argue in Chapter 6 that the innate idea of extension does in fact require some use of the body, and that the innate ideas and truths of geometry also require the use of either sense-perception or the imagination, to serve as the data upon which we can reflect. But this is not to say that our perceptions of those innate ideas seem to come to us from external objects. In the remainder of this book, I will continue to use ‘innate idea’ to refer to the ideas that I have just described as ‘fully’ or ‘paradigmatically’ innate.

2.3 The Clarity and Distinctness of Innate Ideas To sum up my interpretation so far, Descartes uses the phrase ‘innate idea’ in three ways. An innate idea in the objective sense (innate ideao) is an eternal nature existing objectively in the intellect. It is present in the mind from birth, giving the thinker a disposition to perceive it. When the essence is actually perceived, the thinker can be said to have an innate idea in the material sense (innate ideam), whose object is the corresponding innate idea in the objective sense. Innate ideasm, then, are perceptions. As such, they may be clear and distinct, or obscure and confused. In this section, I will examine what Descartes means when he describes an innate idea as clear and distinct, and

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how he thinks our innate ideas can become clearer and more distinct. It should be noted that my purpose is restricted to giving an account of the clarity and distinctness of innate ideas, and not of adventitious ideas; an account of how adventitious perceptions can be clear and distinct (or obscure and confused) will no doubt differ in certain respects from my account of the clarity and distinctness of innate ideas, since there are different relationships between the idea in the material sense, the idea in the objective sense, and the external counterpart for the two types of ideas. On the interpretation I have been developing, innate ideas in the objective sense just are things as they exist in the mind; since things cannot be obscure and confused, we cannot speak of obscure and confused or clear and distinct ideaso, either. As the objects of our perceptions, ideaso are the things which are perceived either clearly and distinctly or obscurely and confusedly. What may be more or less clear and distinct are our perceptions of those natures—that is, our innate ideasm.21 Ideasm, then, can be clear and distinct, or obscure and confused, perceptions of our ideaso. This explains why Descartes frequently uses the language of ‘perception’ when characterizing some idea as clear and distinct. For example, when Descartes elaborates on the notions of clarity and distinctness in Principles I 45, he writes that few people ever ‘perceive anything with sufficient accuracy’ to judge about it with certainty, indicating that clarity and distinctness are a matter of accurate perception (CSM I 207/AT VIIIA 21). At the end of the Fourth Meditation, the meditator uses the phrase ‘claram & distinctam perceptionem’ (or ‘clara & distincta perceptio’) three times (CSM II 42–3/AT VII 61–2). To be sure, in some cases he uses adverbs, characterizing the way in which he understands or apprehends, rather than the perception itself, as clear and distinct or obscure and confused. For example, he writes that he will be able to reach the truth if he separates what he understands from cases where he understands ‘more confusedly and obscurely [confusius & obscurius apprehendo]’ (my translation; AT VII 6222), and he says that he understands ‘no less clearly and distinctly [nec minus clare & distincte intelligo]’ that existence belongs to God’s nature than he understands that some property belongs to a shape or number (my translation; AT VII 6523). But such adverbial uses are clearly characterizing an operation of the intellect, rather than the thing perceived. However, Descartes does sometimes also speak of clear and distinct ideas; at the beginning of the Fourth Meditation, for example, he says that his idea of the human mind is more distinct than his ideas of corporeal things, and he refers to his ‘clear and distinct idea [clara & distincta idea]’ of God (CSM II 37/AT VII 53). In these cases, we should take him to be tacitly


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referring to ideasm rather than to ideaso; after all, since he maintains that ‘idea’ is ambiguous between the material and objective senses, it should not be surprising that sometimes ‘idea’ means ‘perception.’ On the interpretation developed in Chapter 1, innate ideaso and perceptions of those innate ideaso are separate but related entities. This interpretation allows us to give a fairly precise account of Cartesian clarity and distinctness as it applies to innate ideas. Descartes’ most explicit explanation of clarity and distinctness occurs in Principles I 45: I call a perception ‘clear’ when it is present and accessible to the attentive mind—just as we say that we see something clearly when it is present to the eye’s gaze and stimulates it with a sufficient degree of strength and accessibility. I call a perception ‘distinct’ if, as well as being clear, it is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear. (CSM I 207/AT VIIIA 22) In his paper ‘Clearness and Distinctness in Descartes,’ Alan Gewirth suggests that Descartes’ criteria for clarity seem, at first glance, to be criteria for the existence of any perception at all.24 After all, he notes, ‘since an idea is “all that which is immediately perceived by the mind,’’ it seems that ideas are by definition ‘present’ to the mind, and such that the mind is ‘attending’ to them.25 Likewise, he points out that it seems that ideas are by definition ‘accessible’—or, as Gewirth translates aperta, ‘open.’ If we look at the analogy with vision, Gewirth suggests, we see that vision is clear when things ‘move the eye sufficiently strongly and openly,’ and that this means that the mind can recognize what it sees; but ‘does not the mind recognize any idea, since an idea is precisely that, and all that, of which the mind is at any moment thinking?’26 Finally, Gewirth maintains, ‘if what has been said about ideas makes all ideas clear, then it also makes them distinct, since the mind perceives only that which it is in fact perceiving, and nothing “other” than that.’27 Gewirth himself wants to argue that these difficulties can be overcome, and that both clarity and distinctness can be normative requirements on perceptions. I think Gewirth’s solution to the puzzle is largely correct, but it can be recast in more Cartesian language by invoking the distinction between ideas in the material sense and ideas in the objective sense. Gewirth stresses that when Descartes writes of clear and distinct perception, he frequently speaks of how some nature is ‘regarded,’ and it is in the gap between what Gewirth calls the ‘directly perceived content’ and the ‘interpretive content’ of ideas that he locates the normativity of clarity and distinctness.28

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Gewirth notes that an idea which is the ‘direct object of perception’ is ‘an independent logical entity containing within itself a system of implications, of simple natures and their relations, which deduction may gradually reveal, and which indeed it is the task of science progressively to discover.’29 Thus our ideas are clear and distinct when the ‘interpretive’ content accurately matches this independent ‘direct’ content. I take Gewirth’s ‘directly perceived content’ of an idea to be equivalent to ‘idea in the objective sense,’ and the ‘interpretive content’ to be essentially the same as ‘idea in the material sense.’ My own view is that, in fact, Descartes is unable to allow for the possibility of completely obscure and confused perceptions: perceptions, I will argue, are by definition at least somewhat clear and distinct. We saw earlier that innate ideas in the objective sense cannot be characterized as either clear and distinct or obscure and confused; they just are what they are. There is an analogous problem with characterizing perceptions as more or less present and open to the attending mind. Perceptions are perceivings, acts of the intellect; and an act of perceiving is, by definition, present and open to the attending mind. The solution I want to suggest is that the qualities of being ‘present and open to an attending mind’ and ‘clear and distinct’ must characterize different items, innate ideas in the objective sense and our perceptions of those ideas, respectively. Perceptions can be more or less clear and distinct; ideas (in the objective sense) cannot. But innate ideas in the objective sense can be more or less present and open to an attending mind; perceptions cannot. In other words, a clear perception occurs when an innate idea in the objective sense is present and open to an attending mind. Of course, the fact that I perceive an idea at all means that that idea must be present and open to my mind—otherwise, I would not be able to perceive it. Because any perception whatsoever is, by definition, a perception of something, that something must be present and open to the mind; thus there can be no wholly obscure perceptions. That is, an entirely obscure perception would ipso facto be a perception of nothing, and would thus not count as a perception at all. Descartes holds that perceptions can be more or less clear and distinct.30 We can see how degrees of clarity are possible by considering Descartes’ analogy with vision. In Principles I 45, he writes that ‘we say that we see something clearly when it is present to the eye’s gaze and stimulates it with a sufficient degree of strength and accessibility’ (CSM I 207/AT VIIIA 22). Just as objects can stimulate our eyes with greater or lesser degrees of strength, he thinks some ideas are more striking to us than others. In other words, the clarity of a perception could be cashed out in terms of something like


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the vividness of the perceived idea in the objective sense. This might be what Descartes has in mind in the Sixth Meditation, for example, where, instead of speaking of clear and distinct ideas, he speaks of ‘lively and vivid [vividae & expressae]’ and distinct ideas (CSM II 52/AT VII 75). Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, who took themselves to be following in the Cartesian tradition, also state in the Port-Royal Logic that ‘we can say that an idea is clear to us when it strikes us in a lively manner.’31 All perceptions, then, are minimally clear, but since some ideas are easier to perceive, or are more attention-getting, than others, they lead to clearer perceptions than less vivid ideas. My interpretation of clear perceptions as those that are of present and open ideas does require that we read Principles I 45 as not expressing quite what Descartes means. His formulation suggests that the clear perceptions are themselves present and open to an attending mind, while I am reading him as meaning that a clear perception is of an idea in the objective sense which is open and present to an attending mind. But I do not think that this is a serious hindrance to my reading; after all, since he allows that ‘idea’ is ambiguous, it is not implausible to read him as shifting between the objective and material senses of ‘idea’ here. What about distinctness? In the Principles passage, Descartes says that a perception is distinct ‘if, as well as being clear, it is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear’ (CSM I 207–8/AT VIIIA 22). But what does it mean to say that a distinct perception ‘contains’ only what is clear? We have seen that the simple notions are those things ‘from which our thoughts are composed’ (AT VIIIA 22). When we investigate what an idea contains, we are, Descartes thinks, investigating how it could be composed from certain other, simple ideas. Thus when Descartes says that a distinct perception is one which contains only what is clear, I take him to mean that a distinct perception accurately mirrors the contents of the idea that it represents—that is, that not just the idea but the contents of the idea are perceived (which, as we saw, means that it will be at least minimally clear). A perception which is clear but not distinct would thus be a perception which fails to include some of the ‘contents’ of the idea of which it is a perception. For example, a young child could have a clear but confused perception of a triangle, by perceiving only the fact that a triangle has three sides, and failing to perceive any of the truths that Descartes thinks are ‘contained’ in the idea of the triangle, such as that the sum of its three angles is equal to the sum of two right angles. A more distinct perception would include more of the contents of the idea; a maximally distinct idea would include as many of the contents as possible.32

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In his ‘Clearness and Distinctness in Descartes,’ Gewirth emphasizes Descartes’ suggestion that obscure and confused perceptions result from a failure to ‘regard’ things properly.33 For example, in the Principles Descartes says that ‘pain and color and so on are clearly and distinctly perceived when they are regarded merely as sensations or thoughts. But when they are judged to be real things existing outside our mind, there is no way of understanding what sort of things they are’ (CSM I 217/AT VIIIA 33).34 I would read Descartes as saying that a perception consists partly in ‘regarding’ an idea in a certain way, and that this ‘regarding’ may involve false assumptions—‘prejudices,’ to use a Cartesian term—about what the idea actually contains. Regarding an idea incorrectly can result in two kinds of mistakes about what that idea contains. First, one will be more likely to overlook or fail to notice features that the idea actually contains; thus one’s perception will not contain some feature which is in fact available, in the idea, to a truly attentive mind. Perceptions can be rendered more distinct by paying attention to the idea and noticing more of these features. Thus, Descartes writes that ‘once the idea of the true God has been conceived, although we may detect additional perfections in him which we had not yet noticed, this does not mean that we have augmented the idea of God; we have simply made it more distinct and explicit, since, so long as we suppose that our original idea was a true one, it must have contained all these perfections’ (CSM II 256/AT VII 371). The second type of error is to attribute to the idea features which it does not really have. In this kind of case, one’s perception will include some feature which isn’t clear, since that feature wouldn’t really be present to a mind which was closely attending to the idea. Descartes describes this sort of error in Principles I 54. He writes: We can . . . have a clear and distinct idea of uncreated and independent thinking substance, that is of God. Here we must simply avoid supposing that the idea adequately represents everything which is to be found in God; and we must not invent any additional features, but concentrate only on what is really contained in the idea and on what we clearly perceive to belong to the nature of a supremely perfect being. (CSM I 211/ AT VIIIA 26) He says something similar in the Second Set of Replies, writing that ‘No one can possibly go wrong when he tries to form a correct conception of the idea of God, provided he is willing to attend to the nature of a supremely perfect being. But some people muddle things up by including other


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attributes, which leads them to speak in a contradictory way’ (CSM II 99/ AT VII 138). He thinks people often have confused ideas of duration, order, and number for similar reasons: We shall also have a very distinct understanding of duration, order and number, provided we do not mistakenly tack on to them any concept of substance. Instead, we should regard the duration of a thing simply as a mode under which we conceive the thing in so far as it continues to exist. (CSM I 211/AT VIIIA 26) In both cases, Descartes thinks, we commonly assume that the idea under consideration has qualities that it doesn’t really have. Thus, we include these in our perception, even though if we paid closer attention we would realize that we hadn’t really perceived those qualities at all. Let’s consider how this account would work in an example. Suppose I have a perception of a triangle—that is, that the idea (in the objective sense) of a triangle is ‘present and open’ to my mind. We saw earlier that if I have observed nothing else about my idea of the triangle but that it has three sides, then my perception is clear, but not distinct. But suppose that I notice that the idea contains the truth that the sum of its three angles are equal to two right angles.35 The very fact of noticing this means that I now have a clear perception of that truth, and in specifying what the idea of the triangle implicitly contains, I have rendered my perception of the triangle more distinct. In other words, by clearly perceiving at least some of the contents of the idea, I make my perception of the idea more distinct. Of course, the discovery of a single concept or truth contained in some idea only makes my perception slightly more distinct; it takes a great deal of work to make clear all the elements contained in an idea.36 As I make my perceptions of innate ideas more distinct by noticing what the innate ideas in the objective sense contain, I acquire more and more knowledge about the features of the natures (that is, the ideas in the objective sense) that those perceptions represent. But until I clearly perceive the contents of a given idea, those contents are merely potentially perceivable. Again, suppose I have a perception of a triangle, but I know nothing more about it; although the idea of a triangle includes the truth that the sum of its three angles is equal to two right angles, I do not know that yet. Descartes says that the truth is only ‘implicitly’ contained in the idea of the triangle. Since that truth is not yet clear to me, my perception of the triangle does not contain only what is clear, so it is not distinct; it is still confused. In other words, confused perceptions are perceptions of ideas (in the objective

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sense) which still implicitly contain other features, features which have not yet been perceived. Indeed, the word implicitus, from which implicite derives, is the past participle of implico, to involve, entangle, or entwine;37 when features are still ‘entangled’ in an idea, and have not yet been perceived, then the perception of that idea is not yet distinct. It should be clear now how distinctness can be a normative quality; the distinctness of a perception depends on the extent to which that perception mirrors the features which actually exist in the idea in the objective sense. Descartes also holds that when our perceptions are clear and distinct, we can be sure that they are true; this guarantee is underwritten by the fact that God cannot be a deceiver. So, if I have a clear and distinct perception of some objectively existing nature A, and my perception includes quality B, then the nature A must really possess quality B.38 Clear and distinct perceptions thus reveal the natures of things; to have knowledge about natures, we need to make our perceptions as clear and distinct as possible, so that they ‘contain’ all and only the features that the natures ‘contain.’ There is one group of ideas which do not seem to fit this model, however: the simple ideas themselves. We can make sense of perceiving such an idea with more or less clarity, depending on the forcefulness with which it strikes the intellect, but what sense can we make of distinctness, since simple ideas do not contain any further features? I would suggest that although confused perception of a simple idea cannot result from a failure to perceive some content of that idea, since there are no such contents, a confused perception can still result from the second type of error I described earlier, in which one mistakenly adds some feature to one’s perception of the idea. Indeed, the passage from the Principles (cited above) in which Descartes describes the second type of error invokes the ideas of duration, order, and number, which he elsewhere characterizes as simple (CSM II 14/AT VII 20). Similarly, Descartes says that if one thinks that one does not have complete knowledge of a simple, even if one does not attribute any specific additional features to it, then one’s perception of it is confused (CSM I 45/AT X 420).39

2.4 Conclusion In this chapter I have looked at how distinguishing innate ideas in the objective sense from innate ideas in the material sense affects the interpretation of other issues connected to Descartes’ theory of innate ideas, such


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as how we are to take his remark that innate ideas ‘seem to derive simply from [his] own nature,’ how some ideas can be said to ‘contain’ other natures, and how innate ideas can be said to be clear and distinct. With the tripartite interpretation now in place, I turn in the next chapter to an investigation into how Descartes thinks our innate ideas in the dispositional sense become actualized.

Chapter 3

The Role of Reflection in Perceiving Innate Ideas

In Chapter 1, I surveyed various interpretations from the secondary literature of how Descartes thinks our innate ideas are present in us before we actually notice them: the dispositional account, the ‘present but submerged’ account, and the ‘recollection’ account. I argued that we need not read Descartes as confused or inconsistent, for there is textual evidence for a unified account of Cartesian innateness. In Chapter 2, I explored in greater depth what Descartes means by innate ideas in the objective sense and innate ideas in the material sense. In this chapter, I begin to examine Descartes’ views on the third sense of ‘innate idea,’ the dispositional sense. To possess an innate idea in the objective sense involves possessing a disposition to perceive that idea. That is, our innate ideaso become the objects of innate ideasm through the exercise of our capacity to perceive them— through our innate ideasd; and this capacity is exercised through attending to or reflecting on our own thoughts. Thus the concepts of reflection and attention play a central role in Descartes’ account of how we come to perceive our innate ideas. As Descartes puts it in a letter to Mersenne, ‘the soul acquires all its knowledge by the reflection [la reflexion] which it makes either on itself (in the case of intellectual matters) or (in the case of corporeal matters) on the various dispositions of the brain to which it is joined, which may result from the action of the senses or from other causes’ (CSMK III 140/AT II 598). Robert McRae has provided convincing evidence that Descartes thought that certain innate ideas are ‘implicit’ in thought and rendered explicit through some kind of reflection.1 In Section 1 I will present not only McRae’s evidence for the reflective account, but additional passages which suggest that, for Descartes, some of our innate ideas are known through reflection because they are implicit in our thoughts. In Section 2 I discuss Descartes’ account of why infants do not explicitly perceive their innate ideas; briefly, his view is that the capacity for perceiving innate ideas will

Role of Reflection in Perceiving Innate Ideas

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remain unactualized so long as our attention is held by adventitious, sensory ideas. In Section 3 I turn to some examples of Cartesian innate ideas, showing how they come to be explicitly perceived in the Meditations. As we have seen, Descartes distinguishes in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind between purely intellectual natures, purely material natures, and ‘common’ natures which apply to both intellectual and material things. There are innate ideas corresponding to all three categories: some, like the idea of thought, are purely intellectual; the idea of extension is purely material; and some, like the idea of substance or the proposition that ‘Nothing comes from nothing,’ can pertain to either intellectual or material things. The examples of innate ideas considered in Section 3 are drawn from a paragraph in the Third Meditation in which Descartes discusses innate ideas; they are the ideas of thing, truth, and thought. The first two of these are cases of nonpropositional ‘common’ natures, while the idea of thought is purely intellectual (and, too, is non-propositional).2 In Section 4 I turn to Descartes’ account of how we exercise our disposition to perceive the innate idea of God. Innate ideas pertaining to ‘purely material’ things, such as the ideas of extension and the shapes it can take, as well as propositional ideas such as geometrical truths and the ‘common notions,’ will be addressed in subsequent chapters.

3.1 The Reflective Account According to McRae’s characterization of the reflective account, Cartesian innate ideas are ‘concepts which are discovered by reflection on the self.’3 On this account, we have implicit knowledge of innate ideas simply through the process of thinking, for those ideas are somehow ‘involved’ in our thought, and we acquire explicit knowledge of these ideas through attention to and reflection upon our thought. Thus McRae writes that for Descartes, Certain universal concepts such as ‘thought,’ ‘existence,’ ‘thing,’ ‘substance,’ ‘duration,’ ‘number,’ and the universal principle ‘He who thinks exists,’ are all capable of being derived by intuitive induction from my experience or consciousness of any individual act of thinking. Every man has an implicit knowledge of these concepts from the mere fact that he thinks and is conscious of thinking. In that sense they are innate in all men. . . . They are innate in that we find them in ourselves when we

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reflect on what is implicit in our consciousness or experience of ourselves as thinking.4 McRae’s suggestion that Descartes thinks we have ‘implicit knowledge’ of some concepts is supported by a number of texts. As McRae points out, Descartes distinguishes in the Conversation with Burman between implicit and explicit knowledge, where he says that the general proposition ‘Whatever thinks exists’ is ‘implicitly presupposed and prior [implicite semper praesupponitur et praecedit]’ to the inference ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’ (CSMK III/AT V 147).5 Likewise, concerning the idea of God, he says: Explicitly [explicite], we are able to recognize our own imperfection before we recognize the perfection of God. This is because we are able to direct our attention to ourselves before we direct our attention to God. Thus we can infer our own finiteness before we arrive at his infiniteness. Despite this, however, the knowledge of God and his perfection must implicitly always come before [implicite semper praecedere] the knowledge of ourselves and our imperfections. (CSMK III 338/AT V 153) In other texts, Descartes draws a distinction between two types of awareness, one which we have simply by virtue of thinking, and another which involves a willed act of attention to the process of thinking. This is a theme throughout Descartes’ unfinished dialogue, The Search For Truth. The character Eudoxus, claiming to be able to show Epistemon and Polyander ‘the truths which can be deduced from the ordinary facts known to each of us’ (CSM II 404/AT X 503), responds to a challenge that he ‘should really have taught Polyander first of all what doubt is, what thought is, what existence is, so that his reasoning might have the strength of a demonstration’ (CSM II 416/AT X 522). Eudoxus replies: But someone who wants to examine things for himself, and to base his judgements about them on his own conceptions, must surely have enough mental capacity to have adequate knowledge of what doubt, thought, and existence are, whenever he attends to the question, without having to be taught the difference between them. Besides, there are, in my view, some things which are made more obscure by our attempts to define them: since they are very simple and clear, they are perceived and known just on their own, and there is no better way of knowing and perceiving them. (CSM II 417/AT X 523–4)


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And he continues: What convinces us of them is simply our own experience or awareness— that awareness or internal testimony [propriâ experientiâ, eâque conscientiâ, vel interno testimonio] which everyone experiences within himself when he ponders on such matters. Thus it would be pointless trying to define, for someone totally blind, what it is to be white: in order to know what that is, all that is needed is to have one’s eyes open and to see white. In the same way, in order to know what doubt and thought are, all one need do is to doubt or to think. (CSM II 418/AT X 524) Polyander then agrees with Eudoxus, saying, ‘I can say for sure that I have never doubted what doubt is, though I only began to recognize it, or rather to give my attention to it, when Epistemon tried to cast doubt on it’ (CSM II 418/AT X 524). Descartes, then, wants to replace the view that real understanding is a matter of being able to give Aristotelian-style definitions in terms of genus and differentia6 with the view that we have genuine knowledge of certain notions simply through the experientia, conscientia, or internum testimonium that we have of them. To be sure, as Polyander says, we may not yet recognize this knowledge; it may only be implicit. But it is, nonetheless, knowledge.7 Our implicit knowledge of what some notion is becomes explicit when we ‘ponder on’ or direct our attention to the question of what that thing is. To use the distinctions introduced in Chapter 1, our possession of implicit knowledge of some concept means that we have an innate idea in the objective sense of that thing, entailing that we have a disposition—an innate idead—to engage in an act of thought in which that thing is the object. I have suggested that conscientia is an implicit awareness. Likewise, Descartes uses the word conscius to describe our state of mind when we have conscientia of something. And in fact Descartes thinks we are conscius of everything that happens in our minds: he says that ‘we cannot have any thought of which we are not aware [conscii] at the very moment when it is in us,’ with the qualification that this is true only of our mental acts and not of our mental faculties (CSM II 171–2/AT VII 246). But because this awareness is implicit, Descartes’ meaning is quite different from the meaning of our word ‘consciousness.’ As Descartes says in the Sixth Set of Replies, this implicit internal awareness ‘always precedes reflective knowledge [reflexam semper antecedit]’ (CSM II 285/AT VII 422). In the Conversation with Burman, however, Descartes characterizes being conscius itself as a reflective state: he tells Burman that ‘to be aware is both to think and to reflect on one’s

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thought [conscium esse quidem cogitare et reflectere supra suam cogitationem]’ (CSMK III 335/AT V 149). As Daisie Radner and Michael Radner have pointed out, a regress threatens here, for if the reflective act is supposed to be distinct from the thought of which we are said to be aware, then, since the reflective act itself constitutes a thought, it will require a further act by which we are aware of it, and so on.8 If, however, Descartes thinks that the mental act by which we perceive some thought just is that thought itself, there will be no regress.9 And, indeed, Descartes says just this, in the Seventh Set of Objections. He writes: The initial thought by means of which we become aware [advertimus] of something does not differ from the second thought by means of which we become aware that we were aware of it, any more than this second thought differs from the third thought by means of which we become aware that we were aware that we were aware. (CSM II 382/AT VII 559) Thus we should take the ‘reflection’ to which Descartes refers in the Conversation with Burman, the ‘reflection’ which constitutes being conscius, or having conscientia of some thought, not as a distinct, volitional act of thought, but as the thought itself. More typically, however, when Descartes writes of ‘reflection,’ he means a distinct volitional act of attention. Antoine Arnauld later held a similar view, writing that ‘in addition to the reflection which can be called virtual and which is found in all our perceptions, there is another, more explicit, 10 in which we examine our perception by another perception.’ In sum, Cartesian conscientia is a type of reflection, to the extent that it is an implicit awareness of whatever is going on in our minds, but we can also explicitly— or consciously, in our sense of the word—attend to our thoughts, and the knowledge that we acquire in doing so is reflective knowledge. Descartes invokes this latter sense of ‘reflection’ in his Replies to the Sixth Set of Objections. He is replying to the objection that ‘in order to be certain that you are thinking you must know what thought or thinking is, and what your existence is; but since you do not yet know what these things are, how can you know that you are thinking or that you exist?’ (CSM II 278/AT VII 413). He writes: It is true that no one can be certain that he is thinking or that he exists unless he knows what thought is and what existence is. But this does not require reflective knowledge [scientia reflexa], or the kind of knowledge


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that is acquired by means of demonstrations; still less does it require knowledge of reflective knowledge, i.e. knowing that we know, and knowing that we know that we know, and so on ad infinitum. This kind of knowledge cannot possibly be obtained about anything. It is quite sufficient that we should know it by that internal awareness which always precedes reflective knowledge [ut id sciat cognitione illâ internâ, quae reflexam semper antecedit]. This inner awareness of one’s thought and existence is so innate in all men that, although we may pretend that we do not have it if we are overwhelmed by preconceived opinions and pay more attention to words than to their meanings, we cannot in fact fail to have it. (CSM II 285/AT VII 422) Descartes says here that to have ‘knowledge of reflective knowledge’ is to know that I know what thought is; thus reflective knowledge, in this case, is knowing what thought is. But he also says, at the beginning of the passage, that one can know what thought is without reflective knowledge. Thus there are two ways in which we can know what thought is: through cognitio interna, or through scientia reflexa. The first kind of knowledge is implicit knowledge; we have this because we are conscii of thinking.11 The second level of knowledge, scientia reflexa, is attained when we explicitly realize, through a further mental act, what thought is.12 To use the terms introduced in Chapter 1, we can be said, at that point, to have an ideam of thought. Further levels of knowledge can be attained by noticing that we have scientia of something; thus we would have scientia scientiae reflexae, knowledge that we know what thought is, and so on.13 Descartes continues: Thus when anyone notices that he is thinking and that it follows from this that he exists, even though he may never before have asked what thought is or what existence is, he still cannot fail to have sufficient knowledge of them both to satisfy himself in this regard. (CSM II 285/AT VII 422) Descartes’ point is that, contrary to what the objector has claimed, one can explicitly notice that one is thinking without explicitly noticing what thought is. That is, I can attend to the fact that I am thinking (something which I already knew implicitly, because I am conscius of every thought) before I have attended to the concept of thought itself. But this does not mean, Descartes says, that I have no knowledge of the concept of thought; for I do have implicit awareness of what it is.

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In sum, we have what can be described as two levels of knowledge concerning our mental experiences. One level is a sort of knowledge-byacquaintance, which we have simply by virtue of having some mental experience; this is an awareness that is not separate from the actual mental experience itself. The second level is attained when one explicitly perceives, through a separate act of thought, that of which one already had first-level knowledge. And once I have explicitly perceived some thought, I can further reflect on it to discover its properties; for example, once I have explicitly and by a separate thought perceived what thought is, I can then attend to and examine my idea of thought to discover what that thought contains. McRae seems right, then, that for Descartes some innate ideas are implicit in our mental experiences and are rendered explicit through reflection. One ambiguity with McRae’s discussion of the way the reflective account is at work in the Meditations is that he sometimes suggests that reflection is to be aimed just at the cogito, and sometimes that it can be directed at any thought at all. That is, he shifts between speaking of concepts as derived from reflection on any part of the process of thinking and speaking of concepts derived specifically from reflection on the cogito.14 It is not clear, then, whether he thinks that Descartes holds that reflection can help us discover concepts displayed in any thought, or just concepts displayed in the cogito. I would suggest that there is no necessary connection between the meditator’s perceptions of these ideas and the cogito.15 As we saw earlier, in The Search for Truth Descartes indicates that one can ‘have adequate knowledge of what doubt, thought, and existence are, whenever he attends to the question’ (CSM II 417/AT X 523–4); he does not suggest that these can only be known by reflection specifically on the cogito. Nor does he suggest that in the Sixth Set of Replies (CSM II 285/AT VII 422). Descartes would say, I think, that in principle a reflective, attentive mind could discover what concepts it depends on in thought by attending to any of its thoughts. In practice, however (and as we shall see in more detail in the next section), human minds are not very good at attending to their own thoughts, mainly because of the distracting influence of the body. Thus the method of doubt is necessary in order to help steer the mind away from its sense-perceptions; and the result of the method of doubt is that only the cogito is left as a certain truth. Thus the result of relying on the method of doubt is that the cogito is the only thought one can attend to. One feature which all Cartesian innate ideas evidently share, then, is that they are perceived through reflection and attention. The intellect is equipped with innate ideas, natures existing objectively in the intellect,


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which we have a capacity to perceive; reflection is the way that this capacity gets actualized. As we shall see later in this chapter, some ideas are implicit in the very process of thinking; in these cases, the ideas are made explicit through reflection directed at thoughts that we have simply by virtue of being thinking things. In Chapter 6 we will examine how reflection can be directed at sense-perceptions (such as a sense-perception of a piece of wax) in order to perceive the innate idea of extension. Descartes also attributes a role to reflection in our perceptions of mathematical truths about shapes and numbers. And, finally, it is through attention and reflection that we are able to make our perceptions of our innate ideas even more distinct. We saw in Chapter 2 that since innate ideas in the objective sense just are objects existing in a special way in the intellect, they cannot be appropriately characterized as either obscure and confused or as clear and distinct. As I argued there, when Descartes says that a clear perception is ‘present and open to the attending mind,’ he means that the ideao which the perception represents is present and open to the attending mind. Since this is just what it means to say that an idea is perceived, no perceptions are really completely obscure, for that would just be to say that no perception occurred. Thus any perception of an innate idea is, by definition, at least somewhat clear. I did suggest, however, that if we take clarity to be something like vividness, perceptions can be characterized as more or less clear according to the vividness with which the idea strikes us. And, I suggested, Descartes takes distinctness to be a matter of making the contents of an ideao clear— that is, of perceiving as much of the contents of an idea as possible, and not adding features to the idea which it does not really contain. To make an innate perception more distinct, then, is to include in one’s perception (in one’s innate ideam) more of the features that are actually contained in the innate ideao. To do this, we need to notice which features the idea actually contains, and avoid attributing to the idea features which it does not really have. For example, if I have a perception of a triangle, then the idea of a triangle must be ‘present and open’ to my mind. If I have observed only that the idea of the triangle has three sides, then my perception is clear, but not distinct. But if I notice that the idea contains the truth that the sum of its three angles is equal to two right angles, then I have a new, clear perception of that truth, and in specifying what the idea of the triangle implicitly contained, I have rendered my perception of the triangle more distinct. In clearly perceiving more and more of the contents of the idea, I thereby make my perception of the idea more distinct.

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In this process, too, the notion of attention will turn out to be central. A statement the meditator makes at the end of the Fourth Meditation seems to sum up the process: For I shall unquestionably reach the truth, if only I give sufficient attention [satis attendam] to all the things which I perfectly understand, and separate these from all the other cases where my apprehension is more confused and obscure. And this is what I shall take good care to do from now on. (CSM II 43/AT VII 62) By attending to our ideas, we make our perceptions of them more distinct, for attention reveals the features that the natures (the ideaso) in fact possess.16 By attending to our ideas, we perceive more and more of their contents, which are themselves innate ideas. Thus the process of making some of our innate ideas clearer and more distinct is also a process of perceiving more of our innate ideas.17

3.2 Attention, Reflection, and the Interference of the Body Descartes holds, quite reasonably, that humans do not actually perceive all of their innate ideas right from the moment of birth. He thinks that our capacity to perceive our innate ideas can remain unactualized for years, or even for an entire lifetime. This is because the body interferes by constantly bombarding our minds with impressions, the adventitious ideas, which manage to divert our attention away from non-corporeal matters. In this section, I will explore how this diversion occurs, and how Descartes thinks it can be prevented. According to Descartes’ account in The Passions of the Soul, adventitious ideas occur in the soul when the animal spirits, flowing through the nerves, move the pineal gland, which then somehow acts on the soul (CSM I 341/ AT XI 354–5). The animal spirits can be stimulated to move either by external objects, causing us to have sensory perceptions, or by the body itself, causing perceptions of ‘hunger, thirst, and other natural appetites . . . [and] pain, heat and the other states we feel as being in our limbs, and not as being in objects outside us’ (CSM I 337/AT XI 346–7). These two types of adventitious ideas are precisely the ideas which Descartes says occupy the mind of an infant, and which will continue to occupy the mind of an adult who does not take steps to think of different ideas. The human ‘default


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state,’ as it were, is for the intellect to receive these impressions; no act of will is required in order to think of them. However, because we have a will, we need not always be in this ‘default state.’ Although in the Meditations Descartes emphasizes that function of will by which it affirms or denies propositions and pursues or avoids ends, he points out in The Passions of the Soul that the will also has the ability to direct the intellect’s attention so that it focuses on certain objects: When we want to imagine something we have never seen, this volition has the power to make the gland move in the way required for driving the spirits towards the pores of the brain whose opening enables the thing to be represented. Again, when we want to fix our attention for some time on some particular object, this volition keeps the gland leaning in one particular direction during that time. (CSM I 344/AT XI 361) Both cases involve directing attention; the movement of the pineal gland causes a certain impression to be maintained in the brain, to which the intellect then attends.18 But surely we can use the will to direct the intellect’s attention away from sense-impressions, to ignore them and think of something else. And, indeed, Descartes allows that we can do this, although he specifies that many perceptions ‘can be changed by the soul only indirectly’ (CSM I 343/AT XI 359–60). That is, one cannot directly will not to feel (for example) fear; but one can indirectly suppress feelings of fear by using the will to direct one’s attention to other ideas, ideas which will cause one to feel some other passion (boldness, for example) (CSM I 345/AT XI 362–3). Attention to other ideas can achieve this effect because of a natural arrangement between the mind and the brain which links certain thoughts with certain movements of the pineal gland (CSM I 342/AT XI 357).19 Thus the ‘indirect’ process of willing not to perceive some adventitious idea is in fact a process of willing directly that one’s intellect consider some other idea—a process, that is, of directing the intellect’s attention. In the examples Descartes cites in The Passions of the Soul, the will directs attention by willing that the intellect entertain certain perceptions, which are produced through changes in the pineal gland. But not all perceptions are caused by pineal-gland movements. Some perceptions are caused by the soul itself: perceiving volitions, imagining non-existent things, and thinking of purely intelligible, non-imaginable things (CSM I 335–6/AT XI 343–4).20 Descartes implies that such perceptions can be changed directly through willing,21 although he does not provide details. Presumably when thinking of such soul-caused perceptions, one can simply will to stop thinking of

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them or to have some other soul-caused perceptions instead. And, at least in theory, one can will to have a soul-caused idea at any time. Many of the ideas that Descartes says are innate are also purely intelligible and non-imaginable; thus the intellect can, in theory, be directed at any time to consider them through an act of will. But in practice, Descartes thinks, the situation is more complex. As Descartes stresses in the Principles, the human condition is such that the mind is constantly caused to have adventitious impressions which compete with intelligible ideas for the intellect’s attention. Moreover, because the mind has had such impressions throughout its life, it acquires ‘more practice and a greater aptitude for thinking about them than it has for thinking about other things’ (CSM I 220/AT VIIIA 37). Thus, keeping the intellect focused on other matters requires more than just a single act of will. It requires constant, sustained effort, which, Descartes points out, is exhausting: ‘our mind is unable to keep its attention on things without some degree of difficulty and fatigue; and it is hardest of all for it to attend to what is not present to the senses or even to the imagination’ (CSM I 220/AT VIIIA 37). Moreover, we are handicapped in our ability to focus on our innate ideas by the fact that ‘the ideas perceived by the senses were much more lively and vivid, and even, in their own way, more distinct than any of those which I deliberately formed through meditating’22 (CSM II 52/AT VII 75). Sensory ideas are simply more attention-grabbing than purely intellectual ideas to start with. Thus there are several reasons why infants do not perceive their innate ideas in the objective sense, the things which are implicit in their own thoughts and other ideas. Infants are constantly receiving very vivid impressions from the senses, and overcoming these would take not just one act of will but a sustained, exhausting effort of the will. It takes practice and time to develop a will that has enough patience and constancy to direct the intellect’s attention to innate ideas. Thus, in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes compares perspicuous intuition to the trained vision of a craftsman, distinguishing between the ‘confused’ attention of the ordinary, untrained observer, who tries to attend to too much, and the focused attention of the practiced craftsman (CSM I 33/AT X 400–1). Meditation involves the latter kind of attention, in which infants are not yet able to engage, for infancy is a time ‘before we had the full use of our reason’ (CSM I 193/AT VIIIA 5). Indeed, Descartes thinks that even adults frequently lack the requisite constancy of will to actually perceive their innate ideas. Although he says in the Fourth Meditation that the will is ‘so perfect and so great that the possibility of a further increase in its perfection or greatness is beyond my


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understanding’ and that it is ‘above all in virtue of the will that I understand myself to bear in some way the image and likeness of God,’ he actually qualifies these claims by specifying that his will is comparable to God’s will only ‘when considered as will in the essential and strict sense’ (CSM II 39–40/AT VII 56–7). The ‘essential and strict sense’ of will is its ability to affirm, deny, pursue, or avoid. In other respects, however, God’s will is stronger than the meditator’s: ‘God’s will is incomparably greater than mine, both in virtue of the knowledge and power that accompany it and make it more firm and efficacious, and also in virtue of its object, in that it ranges over a greater number of items’ (CSM II 40/AT VII 57). Burman asked Descartes about this part of the Meditations, claiming that if on Descartes’ account the understanding is imperfect and limited, ‘in that case our will too is imperfect. We will one moment, and not the next; one moment we have a volition, the next—when our will is imperfect— merely a slight inclination’ (CSMK III 341/AT V 158). Descartes answers that that simply shows that there is a lack of constancy in our volition, not that there is any imperfection in our will. Each act of the will is as perfect as the next; the fluctuation you speak of has its origin in judgement, and is due to the fact that our judgement is faulty. (CSMK III 341–2/AT V 158) Descartes’ position, then, is that insofar as the will can affirm or deny a proposition (or pursue or avoid some end), it is perfect; but nonetheless the will does not always continue to affirm or deny what it earlier affirmed or denied. Our judgments vacillate, and in this respect our will can be said to be less firm and efficacious than God’s. And although the will’s ability to direct attention is not a case of making a judgment, it is a form of pursuit; it is similar to contemplating a proposition and then affirming or denying it. It occurs when, for example, the mind perceives that its attention is focused on ideas of sensation but wills to turn the intellect towards—to ‘pursue’—a different type of idea, such as ideas of pure intellect. And in this process, too, the will can vacillate, choosing to turn first to one and then to another, or simply abstaining from choosing and letting the intellect consider whatever ideas occur—which will inevitably be adventitious perceptions.23 Indeed, the Meditations can be read as an exercise in developing constancy of the will. In the First Meditation, the meditator discovers that the project of doubt requires sustained willing in order to remember to withhold assent from his old opinions: ‘My habitual opinions keep coming back, and, despite

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my wishes, they capture my belief, which is as it were bound over to them as a result of long occupation and the law of custom’ (CSM II 15/AT VII 22). Even when he decides to ‘turn [his] will in completely the opposite direction, and deceive [himself], by pretending for a time that these former opinions are utterly false and imaginary’ (CSM II 15/AT VII 22), he finds that ‘this is an arduous undertaking, and a kind of laziness brings [him] back to normal life’ (CSM II 15/AT VII 23). In the Second Meditation, too, he says that he ‘cannot stop thinking’ that he knows corporeal things better than he knows himself (CSM II 20/AT VII 29). Although he has been considering his innate idea of himself, his inability to stop thinking that he knows corporeal things best suggests that the images of these corporeal things are demanding attention, distracting him from sustained meditation on his own nature. And again, in the Third Meditation, the meditator suggests that although he is getting better at sustaining his attention to his innate ideas, it requires concentration for him to do so: If one concentrates carefully [diligenter attendenti], all this is evident by the natural light. But when I relax my concentration [minus attendo], and my mental vision is blinded by the images of things perceived by the senses, it is not so easy for me to remember why the idea of a being more perfect than myself must necessarily proceed from some being which is in reality more perfect. (CSM II 32–3/AT VII 47–8) What is needed is the ability to concentrate, to use the will to focus the intellect on innate ideas for a sustained period of time, to ‘fix’ those ideas in the mind. Without this effort, we will lapse back into thinking of sensory ideas. And since this requires practice, it is natural that infants do not yet have explicit innate ideas. As we cultivate this skill, however, we will be able to perceive more of our innate ideas, and to perceive them more clearly and distinctly, bringing forth more and more of their contents from the ‘treasure house [thesauro]’ of our minds (CSM II 46/AT VII 67). In fact, although Descartes’ innatism was certainly in direct opposition to the Thomistic and Aristotelian views that whatever we know has come in through the senses, the explicative process by which Descartes thinks we come to perceive our innate ideas is in some respects like the scholastic account of abstraction by the agent intellect. For Aquinas, the active intellect somehow abstracts a form from the impressed species;24 for Descartes, the mind actively attends to its own thoughts and somehow draws out from them various general concepts and truths. We might wonder how Descartes thinks the intellect is able to find these concepts and truths, if it does not know in advance what they are. In other


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words, how does the intellect know what to look for? I think the answer to this question is that it doesn’t; but at least the Cartesian method of doubt considerably restricts the range of possible objects of attention. This method leaves the meditator’s conclusion, ‘I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived by my mind’ (CSM II 46/AT VII 67), as well as the thoughts which lead up to and follow from that conclusion, as the best candidates for fruitful reflection, just as Descartes thinks that successful geometrical inquiry involves reflecting on appropriate geometrical objects. This is perhaps another reason why Descartes thinks we need to direct the attention away from the senses: in addition to distracting us, they simply provide too great a range of thoughts to focus on. Limiting our thoughts to purely intellectual subjects will make it that much easier for purely intellectual ideas to be perceived.

3.3 Applying the Reflective Account: Some Examples In Descartes’ Third Meditation discussion of the distinctions between innate, adventitious, and factitious ideas, he mentions three examples of innate ideas. He writes, ‘for that I understand what a thing is, what truth is, what thought is, I seem to have these things from no other place than from my nature itself’ (my translation; AT VII 38). According to the account so far developed, because the meditator implicitly depends on these concepts in his thinking, reflection and attention to his thoughts will enable him to make those concepts explicit. Examining how the meditator perceives these particular examples of innate ideas will shed further light on Descartes’ general account of innate ideas. Robert McRae discusses these three examples in his paper ‘Innate Ideas,’ writing that the three ideas of thing, truth, and thought ‘have . . . an obvious relation to the cogito ergo sum.’ I have already suggested that Descartes does not think that innate ideas can only be made explicit through reflection on the cogito. But perhaps McRae simply thinks that in these three cases, the ideas of thing, truth, and thought happen to be made explicit in this way (even if the cogito need not be involved in the perception of other innate ideas). But even this weaker view seems to me to lack textual support. McRae writes: all three [ideas, viz., thing, truth, and thought] are involved in the experiences [the meditator] has recounted of what had occurred in the first two days, and has now occurred at the beginning of the third day. On the second day Descartes began with a reflection on what had occurred on

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the previous day, when he ‘doubted’, then ‘denied’, and was finally ‘persuaded that there was nothing . . . .’ etc. He finally concluded that this proposition: I am, I exist is necessarily true each time I pronounce it or mentally conceive it. His next question was, What am I? The answer, ‘I am a thinking thing’, is derived wholly from reflection on the cogito ergo sum. In this indubitable statement, I am a thinking thing, there are two general concepts involved: ‘thing’, and ‘thought’, two of the three which Descartes gives as examples of innate ideas. The third concept ‘truth’ is involved in his next reflection on the cogito ergo sum, which occurred at the beginning of the third day.25 On McRae’s interpretation, then, the perception of these ideas is traced back to the meditator’s grasp of the cogito: the concepts of ‘thing’ and ‘truth,’ he says, are ‘involved’ in the proposition ‘I am a thinking thing,’ which is ‘derived wholly from reflection on the cogito ergo sum.’26 But I would argue that this shows only that ‘I am a thinking thing’ is acquired by reflection. To say that the concepts ‘thing’ and ‘truth’ are ‘involved’ in the assertion ‘I am a thinking thing’ needn’t mean anything more than that those concepts are still only implicit in ‘I am a thinking thing,’ and thus that further reflection is needed on that proposition to make them explicit. McRae’s account of how the meditator acquires his idea of ‘truth’ suffers in the same way. He writes that ‘ “truth” is involved in [the meditator’s] next reflection on the cogito ergo sum, which occurred at the beginning of the third day,’ when the meditator decides that clear and distinct perception indicates truth,27 but what McRae thus shows to be acquired by reflection is not the concept ‘truth,’ but a belief about the relation between truth and clear and distinct perception. In all three cases, McRae has established that through reflection upon his recognition that ‘I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind,’ the meditator acquires further beliefs about his own nature and about truth, but he has not shown that it is through reflection that the meditator has explicitly come to understand what ‘thing,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘thought’ are. I think, however, that it is possible to be more specific than McRae is concerning the occasions on which the meditator becomes explicitly aware of what ‘truth’ and ‘thought’ are. After summarizing the doubts induced by the arguments of the First Meditation, the meditator points out to himself that he has convinced himself [persuasi] of certain things, that he is perhaps deceived, and that he thinks [cogitabo] he is something. All of these are mental activities, of which the meditator already has implicit knowledge, since he is conscius of every mental act. But in noticing that he has had these


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thoughts, in attending to his implicit knowledge that he has convinced himself of something, been deceived, and thinks he is something, the meditator thereby acquires explicit knowledge that he has done each of these things. And, indeed, the meditator says it is through ‘considering [pensitatis] everything very thoroughly’ that he concludes that ‘I am, I exist is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind’ (CSM II 17/AT VII 25). What he has considered are, of course, his various mental activities. The meditator now knows explicitly that he thinks. But, in accordance with Descartes’ account in the Sixth Set of Replies, he does not yet explicitly know what thought is. Of course, he does know it implicitly, by virtue of thinking; to make that knowledge explicit, he need only attend to the process of thinking. Towards the middle of the Second Meditation, he does just that, by listing various mental activities that he has actually engaged in: Is it not one and the same ‘I’ who is now doubting almost everything, who nonetheless understands some things, who affirms that this one thing is true, denies everything else, desires to know more, is unwilling to be deceived, imagines many things even involuntarily, and is aware of many things which apparently come from the senses? (CSM II 19/AT VII 28) So, through attention to that of which he has implicit knowledge, the meditator begins to develop an explicit understanding of what thought is.28 The meditator mentions his knowledge of what thought is in the Third Meditation, writing that ‘for that I understand what a thing is, what truth is, what thought is, I seem to have these things from no other place than from my nature itself’ (my translation; AT VII 38). The reference here to his ‘understanding’ suggests that he is not speaking of thing, truth, and thought as they exist objectively, but rather of his actual perceptions of those things, of the mental operations by which he understands them. Indeed, we have just seen that the meditator has an actual perception of what thought is; he also evidently has an actual perception of what truth is. He implicitly relies on the notion of truth in the Second Meditation, for his thought that ‘I am, I exist is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind’ relies on that notion. However, although he has stated that he is looking for something ‘certain and unshakeable’ (CSM II 16/AT VII 24) and even that ‘he is not admitting anything except what is necessarily true’ (CSM II 18/AT VII 27), at this point in the Meditations he has not yet examined what it means to say something is true, or set any criteria for truthclaims. In other words, in the Second Meditation he only implicitly knows

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what truth is, through internum testimonium. He makes this concept explicit in the Third Meditation; after beginning with a list of everything he knows and announcing his plan to ‘cast around more carefully to see whether there may be other things within me which I have not yet noticed’ (CSM II 24/AT VII 35), he restates his certainty that he is a thinking thing, and then concludes: In this first item of knowledge there is simply a clear and distinct perception of what I am asserting; this would not be enough to make me certain of the truth of the matter if it could ever turn out that something which I perceived with such clarity and distinctness was false. (CSM II 24/AT VII 35) In other words, if there were anything that could be both clearly and distinctly perceived and yet false, then he could not be absolutely certain of the truth of this ‘item’; but he is certain that this item is true; so clarity and distinctness are signs of truth. It is through attending to the features of this ‘item’ that the meditator ‘notices’ what he previously knew implicitly, that things that he perceives clearly and distinctly are true.29 What about his understanding of ‘thing’? Again, the meditator invokes this concept when he says that he is ‘in the strict sense only a thing that thinks’ (CSM II 18/AT VII 27). This statement asserts his explicit knowledge that he is a thing; so he implicitly knows what a thing is. And he also seems to be relying on an implicit awareness of what a thing is when he distinguishes, in the Third Meditation, between ideas and those thoughts which have ‘additional forms,’ for he writes that the word ‘idea’ is ‘strictly appropriate’ only when it refers to thoughts which are ‘as it were the images of things,’ while judgments, volitions, and emotions always have ‘a particular thing which I take as the object of my thought’ (CSM II 25–6/AT VII 37). Although there is no point at which the meditator reports that he has actually reflected on those thoughts which rely on the idea of ‘thing,’ he does seem, by the time he refers to his ‘understanding’ of what a thing is (at CSM II 26/AT VII 38), to have rendered his implicit awareness explicit. There is another passage in the Third Meditation which addresses how innate ideas come to be perceived: With regard to the clear and distinct elements in my ideas of corporeal things, it appears that I could have borrowed some of these from my idea of myself, namely substance, duration, number, and anything else of this kind. For example, I think that a stone is a substance, or is a thing capable


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of existing independently, and I also think that I am a substance. Admittedly I conceive of myself as a thing that thinks and is not extended, whereas I conceive of the stone as a thing that is extended and does not think, so that the two conceptions differ enormously; but they seem to agree with respect to the classification ‘substance’. Again, I perceive that I now exist, and remember that I have existed for some time; moreover, I have various thoughts which I can count; it is in these ways that I acquire the ideas of duration and number which I can then transfer to other things.30 (CSM II 30–1/AT VII 44–5) The meditator suggests, then, that he implicitly possesses the innate ideas of substance, duration, and number because he relies on these concepts in his mental experiences. In being aware of the present and remembering the past, he relies on the idea of duration; in counting his ideas, he relies on the idea of number. Looking back over the Meditations up to this point, we can see that the meditator relies upon the notion of duration throughout the Second Meditation, when he remembers his arguments of the First Meditation (CSM II 16/AT VII 23–4) and recalls his former conception of himself (CSM II 17/AT VII 25). And, at the end of the Second Meditation, the meditator’s passing reference to ‘when I see, or think I see (I am not here distinguishing the two)’ (CSM II 22/AT VII 33) shows that he has counted these two thoughts. The meditator also suggests that without noticing it, he has previously relied on or applied the idea of substance in his mental experience. The word ‘substantia’ does not appear until just before this passage (at CSM II 28/AT VII 40), but the meditator has already established, in the Second Meditation, that he is a thinking thing, and that he can be sure that he exists even if the existence of his body is uncertain; in other words, the Second Meditation establishes that his idea of himself is an idea of a thing that can exist independently. This is precisely how the meditator understands ‘substance’; a substance, he says, is ‘a thing capable of existing independently’ (CSM II 30/AT VII 44).31 Thus the meditator has implicitly relied upon the idea of a substance in his mental experiences of the Second Meditation. Of course, the meditator has not yet explicitly noticed what duration, number and substance are, so in speaking of how he ‘acquires’ these ideas, he is speaking of his implicit understanding, the capacity he has to explicitly notice those ideas. I have said that the meditator relies on the notions of thing, substance, truth, thought, number, and duration in the process of thinking. But what does it mean to say a concept is used or relied on in thinking? One thing it

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does not mean is that the concept must be explicitly invoked in the thought. But it may mean that a more complete account—a synthetic account, in Descartes’ terminology—of what one is thinking would explicitly mention that concept. According to the Second Set of Replies, a synthetic account of how some conclusion is reached ‘demonstrates the conclusion clearly and employs a long series of definitions, postulates, axioms, theorems, and problems, so that if anyone denies one of the conclusions it can be shown at once that it is contained in what has gone before’ (CSM II 111/AT VII 156). For example, as Descartes makes clear in Principles I 10, to think the cogito, we must rely not only on the general principle ‘Whatever thinks, exists,’ but also on the concepts of thought and existence.32 Thus to give a synthetic demonstration of the cogito, to lay it out as a proof, would require including that general principle as a premise, as well as defining ‘thought’ and ‘existence.’33 But this is not an entirely satisfactory account, for it seems that in order to know what must be included in a synthetic demonstration of some thought, we need an independent way of identifying the concepts and principles that that thought relies on. However, the only method Descartes seems to have in mind for ascertaining this is the method of analysis—that is, the method of attending carefully to our thoughts in order to discover what those principles and concepts are.34 So it seems we can say only that the concepts and principles that a thought relies on just are those that one discovers when one attends properly to the thought. The notion of proper attention is critical here; in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes emphasizes that perspicuous intuition is like the trained, focused, attentive vision of a craftsman, not like the ‘confused’ vision of the ordinary, untrained observer (CSM I 33/AT X 400–1). The latter sort of attention will not successfully reveal to us all that is there to be perceived. I will return to Descartes’ conception of attention in Section 4.

3.4 Another Example: The Innate Idea of God Although it is not the first of his innate ideas to be discovered, the innate idea of God is said by the meditator to be ‘the first and most important [prima & praecipua]’ of his innate ideas (CSM II 47/AT VII 68). The centrality of the idea of God to Descartes’ project is indisputable. The idea of God also affords a nice example of how Descartes thinks non-propositional ideas come to be explicitly perceived through attentive reflection.


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The meditator seems to become explicitly aware of his innate idea of God in the Third Meditation, where he first mentions ‘the idea that gives me my understanding of a supreme God, eternal, infinite, omniscient, omnipotent and the creator of all things that exist apart from him’35 (CSM II 28/AT VII 40). He then uses this idea to establish that a being corresponding to that idea must exist. In this section, I focus not on the proof for God’s existence, but on the way in which the innate idea of God (in the objective sense) is discovered in the first place. On the account of innate ideas which I have been defending, having the idea of God in the objective sense entails having a capacity to perceive that idea. And Descartes indeed says just this. In the Third Meditation, he speaks of ‘having within me the idea of God [ideam Dei in me habens]’ (CSM II 35/ AT VII 52), but he also speaks of possessing the faculty or power to form the idea of God.36 I take this to mean that we have the power or faculty to perceive the idea in the objective sense; that is, to ‘form an idea of God’ means to come to possess an idea of God in the material sense. In the Fifth Set of Replies, Descartes links the possession of the idea in the objective sense with the possession of a faculty to perceive that idea, writing that he has ‘a faculty for amplifying all created perfections (i.e. conceiving of something greater or more ample than they are)’ due to ‘the fact that there is in us an idea of something greater, namely God’ (CSM II 252/AT VII 365). But sometimes Descartes puts the point in a slightly different way. For example, he tells Hobbes that ‘everyone has the form or idea [formam sive ideam] of understanding; and by indefinitely extending this he can form the idea of God’s understanding’ (CSM II 132/AT VII 188). One might worry that Descartes’ suggestion that we form the idea of God by ‘amplifying’ or ‘extending’ the limited perfections that we find in ourselves means that in fact the idea of God need not be innate. Instead, one might think, the idea of God could be simply a factitious idea, an idea created by amplifying our idea of ourselves. However, as Stephen Menn has correctly pointed out, ‘we can have this power of amplification only because we already (at least implicitly) have an idea of an infinite being. So the human power of amplifying ideas is not an alternative to positing an actual infinite being as the source of our idea of an infinite being.’37 This is quite clear from the passage already cited from the Fifth Set of Replies, where Descartes says that it is because we already have an innate idea of God that we can ‘amplify all created perfections.’ Similarly, in a letter to Regius he says that the idea of God is formed by extending to an infinite degree his finite ideas of wisdom, power, and goodness found in himself, which he could not do unless he

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were created by an infinite being (CSMK III 147/AT III 64).38 So, although the idea of God (in the material sense) is formed through extending and amplifying qualities we find in ourselves, Descartes thinks we would not be able to do this unless we already had within us an innate idea of God in the objective sense. On the account I have provided of how we make our innate ideas explicit, forming the idea of God should require some kind of reflection on our thoughts. And surely a process of amplifying perfections that we perceive in ourselves does involve just that; unless we had noticed that our own qualities are limited, we would not see that they can be extended and amplified. This is precisely the process that Descartes describes in the Third Meditation: when I turn my mind’s eye upon myself, I understand that I am a thing which is incomplete and dependent on another and which aspires without limit to ever greater and better things; but I also understand at the same time that he on whom I depend has within him all those greater things, not just indefinitely and potentially but actually and infinitely, and hence that he is God. (CSM II 35/AT VII 51) Again, summarizing his Third Meditation thoughts in the Fourth Meditation, he writes, ‘when I consider the fact that I have doubts, or that I am a thing that is incomplete and dependent, then there arises in me a clear and distinct idea of a being who is independent and complete, that is, an idea of God’ (CSM II37/AT VII 53). So it is through noticing our own limitations that we come to form the idea of an unlimited, infinite being; and forming this idea is only possible, Descartes thinks, if we already implicitly possess the idea of infinite being. Thus forming an idea of God by amplifying the perfections that we notice in ourselves is itself a process of making explicit the innate idea of God in the objective sense, through attention to our own thoughts. One natural question to ask is why Descartes thinks we must possess an implicit idea of God in order to amplify the limited qualities we find in ourselves. Again, Stephen Menn is helpful on this point. Menn writes: Descartes’ point is most easily understood through the analogy with spatial limitation: I conceive of a limited space by adding the idea of limits to the idea of space as such, and space as such is infinite. I cannot reach the idea of infinite space by negating the idea of spatial limits, or by amplifying the idea of a small bounded region; on the contrary, the idea


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of bounds presupposes the idea of a space outside the bounds, and ultimately the idea of infinite space. Similarly, Descartes says, the idea of a being of limited perfection presupposes the idea of the perfections this being lacks, and ultimately the idea of infinite perfections.39 The point, then, is that to understand what ‘limitation’ means requires understanding what an unlimited thing is; the notion of being unlimited is more fundamental than that of being limited. There is a sense, then, in which a person who knows what it is to be finite must already know what it is to be infinite, although she may never have paid attention to the notion of the infinite. But once she begins to examine the concept of being finite or limited, she will perceive that the idea of limitation is only possible in comparison with an idea of something unlimited. And thus she will perceive that she does, in fact, have an idea of something unlimited. And, indeed, if we look at the order of the meditator’s thoughts in the Third Meditation, it seems that the meditator himself discovers his idea of God in just such a way. He starts to consider his idea of God just after a passage in which he has been considering his belief that his adventitious ideas are transmitted from corporeal things which resemble those ideas. He has just realized that he only believes this because he has a ‘blind impulse [caeco aliquo impulso]’ to do so (CSM II 27/AT VII 40). That realization occurs because he perceives two sorts of limitations to his nature. First, he sees that his will is limited in a certain way, for he observes that ‘these [adventitious] ideas do not depend on my will,’ since he often has these ideas even when he doesn’t want to (CSM II 26/AT VII 38). Now, in the Fourth Meditation the meditator says that his will in the strict sense is unlimited, since ‘the will simply consists in our ability to do or not do something (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or avoid)’ (CSM II 40/AT VII 57). He seems to mean that if we just consider the fact that in any given case the will can respond in one of these ways, then the will is infinite; that is, its ability to pursue, avoid, assent or deny is not limited in any way. Nonetheless, he also concedes in the Fourth Meditation that God’s will is ‘incomparably greater’ than his, ‘both in virtue of the knowledge and power that accompany it and make it more firm and efficacious, and also in virtue of its object, in that it ranges over a greater number of items’ (CSM II 40/AT VII 57). The fact that the meditator has ideas that do not depend on his own will seems to be evidence of a limitation on his will’s power; in having such ideas, he is passive, which means that there is a sphere in which his will does not operate. So his nature is limited in that way.

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The second sort of limitation that the meditator perceives in the Third Meditation is in his intellect, for he sees that his ‘natural impulses [impetus naturales]’ turn out to be unreliable compared to the natural light (CSM II 27/AT VII 39). He realizes that his senses have led him to have ideas on the basis of which he has concluded that certain qualities really are in external objects. For example, in the Second Meditation, his sense perception of the wax presented its various secondary qualities as if they were actually located in the wax. So it is no coincidence that, having just noticed two ways in which his own nature is limited, the meditator’s next thought is of an unlimited being, ‘of a supreme God, eternal, infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, and the creator of all things that exist apart from him’ (CSM II 28/AT VII 40). The shift from focusing on his own limitations as a thinker to thinking about his idea of an infinite God occurs precisely because ‘when I turn my mind’s eye upon myself, I understand that I am a thing which is incomplete and dependent on another and which aspires without limit to ever greater and better things; but I also understand at the same time that he on whom I depend has within him all those greater things’ (CSM II 35/ AT VII 51). Once the innate idea of God is explicit, Descartes can establish that a being corresponding to this idea must really exist. In noticing that he has the ability to conceive of something greater than himself, the meditator discovers his idea of God in the objective sense, and in the Third Meditation he reasons from the high degree of objective reality of this idea to the conclusion that there must really exist an external counterpart to his idea of God.40 In his article ‘The Idea of God and Proofs of His Existence,’ Jean-Marie Beyssade provides an interesting interpretation of the role of the idea of God in Descartes’ Third and Fifth Meditation proofs for the existence of God. My reading of how Descartes thinks the innate idea of God is made explicit bears some similarities to Beyssade’s reading, but, as I shall show, I differ from Beyssade on several important points. Beyssade argues that although the two causal proofs in the Third Meditation (which Beyssade calls ‘a posteriori’) and the a priori ontological argument in the Fifth Meditation in a certain sense start from the idea of God, the proofs also work to establish the content of the idea of God. The puzzle which opens Beyssade’s article concerns an apparent contradiction in Descartes’ views. On the one hand, Descartes says that ‘according to the laws of true logic, one must never ask if something exists without knowing beforehand what it is’ (CSM II 78/AT VII 107–8).41 On the other hand,


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Descartes suggests in the Principles that the proofs for the existence of God also help elucidate the nature of God. Beyssade’s article contains a number of helpful insights, but I believe Beyssade mistakes the meditator’s project of making his ideas clear and distinct for the project of making them explicit. As I read the Meditations, while the proofs for the existence of God do succeed in making his idea of God clearer and more distinct, the idea of God is already explicit before the proofs begin. Beyssade argues that the Third Meditation causal proofs for the existence of God can be read as the meditator’s ‘construction’ of an idea of God, which the meditator then examines in the Fifth Meditation, discovering that it contains the idea of necessary existence within it.42 In the Third Meditation, by noticing that he lacks various perfections, the meditator infers that there is a being which does possess these perfections. As Beyssade puts it, ‘it is in noting the fact that my nature is not such as I would ideally wish it to be, that I come to infer that the being on whom I depend possesses all the perfections which I lack and which I desire.’43 This seems right, and is essentially the same point made by Stephen Menn (discussed above). Beyssade suggests that the meditator’s inference has two stages: (1) In each class of perfection, for example, knowledge, power, duration, constancy and so on, I have a conception of a more perfect being, and eventually I come to conceive of this perfection as infinite (or, which amounts to the same, as indefinite). (2) Next, I pass in a lateral manner, as it were, from one class of perfection to another, and thus construct the idea of an absolutely infinite, or supremely perfect, being.44 And, Beyssade notes, ‘the construction here is in reality a kind of rediscovery.’45 As should be clear by now, I read this ‘construction’ as the construction of an innate idea of God in the material sense by discovering the innate idea of God in the objective sense. Indeed, Beyssade notes that Willis Doney characterizes the idea of God as ‘elicited or made explicit.’46 He also notes that the two processes described above ‘do not generate the idea of God; if they did, the idea would be invented or constructed by the human mind. Instead, they make the idea explicit: it is the prior presence of the idea which makes the thought processes possible.’47 This seems quite right, although invoking Descartes’ distinction between the material and objective senses of ‘idea’ would make the point even clearer. But I differ from Beyssade regarding a critical detail.48 In the Third Meditation, Beyssade argues, the meditator begins with the idea merely of a supremely perfect being, establishes that this idea must be caused

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by a supremely perfect being, and then concludes that that perfect being is God. As Beyssade puts it, ‘the idea of God is what defines the nature of the cause whose existence is inferred. It is what gives a determinate nature to what would otherwise be indeterminate; without it, it would be as if we were saying that we believed in the existence of a nothing (AT IXA 210, lines 5–6: CSM II 273).’49 Thus Beyssade holds that the meditator only realizes that his idea of a supreme being is an idea of God by the end of the Third Meditation proof. But Beyssade does not indicate how the Third Meditation proof could be read as making the innate idea of God explicit. Moreover, it seems clear that the meditator already knows, before beginning the proof, that his idea of this cause is an idea of God. As I read the Third Meditation, the innate idea of God is explicitly perceived before the proof for God’s existence, not during the course of that proof. On my reading, it is through perceiving his own limitations that the meditator comes to explicitly perceive the idea of an unlimited being which he already identifies as God. One source of the problem is that Beyssade evidently equates ‘making explicit’ with ‘making clear and distinct.’ As he reads the Third Meditation, it is one and the same process which both establishes the quod, the existence of God, and also elucidates the quid, his nature. Of course we have to possess an implicit knowledge of what God is if we are to be sure of identifying correctly the being whose existence we are proving. But the task remains of making precise the innate idea of God, which is the idea of a unity that is beyond our comprehension. The process of making this precise will involve both a restriction (by excluding everything whose addition would transform the true God into a false God and make it possible to deny his existence) and also an enumeration (the cataloguing of the divine predicates).50 I think Beyssade is quite right that the meditator makes his innate idea of God more ‘precise’ by both restricting and enumerating what that idea contains. Indeed, Beyssade’s ‘restriction’ and ‘enumeration’ seem to correspond to the two ways already identified in which Descartes thinks we can make our innate ideas more distinct. To make an innate perception more distinct, I have argued, is to include in one’s perception more of the features that are actually contained in the innate idea in the objective sense, both by noticing which features the ideao actually contains, and by avoiding ascriptions of features which the ideao does not really have. Beyssade’s reference to ‘enumeration’ seems to correspond to the process of noticing the


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features actually contained by an idea, while ‘restriction’ involves not attributing features which it does not contain. But, although I agree with Beyssade that Cartesian innate ideas can be made more ‘precise,’ I think Beyssade mistakenly assimilates this process to the process of making an innate idea explicit. The process of making an idea (in the material sense) more distinct presupposes that the idea (in the objective sense) has already been explicitly perceived. They are not the same process. Thus I would adjust Beyssade’s reading in this way: the Third Meditation proof for the existence of God must begin from an alreadyexplicit idea of God. The meditator comes to have this idea through recognizing that his own nature is limited in various ways, and his understanding of what it is to be limited leads him to understand what it is to be unlimited. Once he has perceived the innate idea of God, he seeks to establish that a being corresponding to this idea actually exists. It seems to me that there is a further problem with Beyssade’s reading. As I have said, he argues that the Third Meditation proof both makes explicit and renders ‘precise’ the innate idea of God. I have argued that these two processes are distinct, and that the making-explicit happens before the Third Meditation proof actually begins. This alone does not impugn Beyssade’s claim that the proof succeeds in making that idea more distinct. However, Beyssade provides no evidence that the proof actually does this. Rather, it seems to me that the idea of God is rendered more distinct after the meditator has established, in the Third Meditation, that God exists. The first way that this idea is made more distinct is through a kind of restriction, when the meditator rules out the possibility that God might be a deceiver: By ‘God’ I mean the very being the idea of whom is within me, that is, the possessor of all the perfections which I cannot grasp, but can somehow reach in my thought, who is subject to no defects whatsoever. It is clear enough from this that he cannot be a deceiver, since it is manifest by the natural light that all fraud and deception depend on some defect. (CSM II 35/AT VII 52) A distinct idea is one which is ‘so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear’ (CSM I 208/AT VIIIA 22). In specifying that God cannot be a deceiver, the meditator is sharply separating that idea from his idea of an evil genius, a being otherwise very similar to God. And establishing that the idea of God contains necessary existence (which is the point of the Fifth Meditation proof) is an instance of what Beyssade calls ‘enumeration.’

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3.5 Conclusion As we saw in Chapter 2, Descartes characterizes some simple natures as purely intellectual, some as purely material, and some as ‘common,’ or knowable either by pure intellect or through the use of images; and this latter class consists of both non-propositional concepts (like ‘cause’) and propositional statements. In this chapter I have examined the idea of God and two kinds of non-propositional simple ideas, those which Descartes calls ‘purely intellectual’ and ‘common’ simples in the Rules. These natures are relied on in our thoughts. In Chapters 4 and 5, I will focus on the truths that Descartes says we perceive by the natural light. These truths, too, we will see, are relied on in thinking, and they also are explicitly perceived through reflection.

Chapter 4

The Natural Light Reconsidered

The Cartesian innate ideas include various propositions that Descartes says are known to be true ‘by the natural light,’ or the lumen naturale. Several of these propositions are central to the Meditations’ project of establishing scientia, or lasting certainty, for which Descartes thinks it is essential that he prove the existence of a non-deceiving God. The starting-point for that proof is his perception that from the fact that he thinks, it follows that he exists; this, he says, is something he knows by the natural light. The causal principle invoked in the Third Meditation proof for the existence of God (that there must be at least as much reality in the cause of some effect as there is in the effect itself) is also said to be known by the natural light; and, finally, the meditator appeals to the naturally lit perception that deception depends on a defect in order to establish that God cannot be a deceiver. Only things perceived by the natural light are so clear and distinct that they are absolutely indubitable, according to Descartes; thus only they are suitable starting-points for his project of establishing scientia. Because the propositions known by the natural light are so important to the Meditations, and because these propositions are among the innate ideas, any complete account of Cartesian innateness ought to include an account of what Descartes means by the natural light. Unfortunately, Descartes says almost nothing about what the natural light is supposed to be, apparently assuming that his readers already know what he means. English-speaking commentators on Descartes have said little about the natural light,1 and while French commentators have paid slightly more attention to it, they have nonetheless provided no detailed analysis of the concept of the natural light and the role it plays in the Meditations.2 In 1973, however, John Morris published an article entitled ‘Descartes’ Natural Light’ in the Journal of the History of Philosophy, later reprinted in Eternal Truths and the Cartesian Circle.3 This is just about the only research to have been published on the Cartesian concept of the natural light. However, as I will argue in this chapter, Morris’ interpretation is flawed in several ways. In the next chapter,

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I will present an alternative account of how Descartes thinks we perceive truths by the natural light, drawing on the account I have already provided of how innate ideas in the objective sense come to be perceived. In the next section, I present some reasons for thinking that the propositions said to be known by the natural light are in fact innate ideas, and also that they are equivalent to the common notions and ‘eternal truths.’ In Section 2, I reply to an objection that might be made to my goal of giving a clearer and more detailed account of the truths perceived by the natural light than the few rival accounts that commentators have so far offered. This objection is that there is in fact nothing special about these truths, and that Descartes just means something like ‘reason’ or ‘clear and distinct perception’ when he refers to the natural light. In Section 3 I point out some problems with Morris’ reading, and in Section 4 I offer the beginnings of an alternative account. Finally, in Section 5 I will consider what we can learn about the natural light from the use of the metaphor of light. In the next chapter, I will incorporate my reading of the natural light and the truths it reveals into the account of innate ideas already developed in Chapter 1 through 3.

4.1 The Natural Light, Common Notions, and Innateness Descartes never explicitly states in the Meditations or in his Replies to the Objections that truths perceived by the natural light are innate. But he suggests as much in the 1647 Comments on a Certain Broadsheet when he insists that the ‘common notions’ are innate (CSM I 304/AT VIIIB 359), and in the 1648 Conversation with Burman. During the conversation with Burman, Descartes reportedly said: As regards the common principles and axioms, for example ‘It is impossible that one and the same thing should both be and not be’, men who are creatures of the senses, as we all are at a pre-philosophical level, do not think about these or pay attention to them. On the contrary, since they are present in us from birth with such clarity, and since we experience them within ourselves, we neglect them and think about them only in a confused manner. (CSMK III 332/AT V 146) If we assume that ‘the common principles and axioms’ are identical to the truths of the natural light (a claim which I defend later), then the claim


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that these notions are ‘present in us from birth’ suggests that the truths perceived by the natural light are innate. Likewise, just before introducing his list of ‘Axioms or Common Notions’ in the Second Set of Replies, Descartes exhorts the reader to ‘ponder on those self-evident propositions that they will find within themselves’ (CSM II 115/AT VII 162). The reference to finding axioms which already exist within oneself indicates that these axioms are innate. Even in the 1644 Principles of Philosophy, Descartes does not explicitly say that the common notions or the truths perceived by the natural light are innate. In that work he mentions three examples of claims that he elsewhere identifies as known by the natural light,4 and says that these are ‘common notions or axioms,’ a type of idea which ‘resides within our mind’ (CSM I 209/AT VIIIA 23–4) and ‘have no existence outside our thought’ (CSM I 208/AT VIIIA 22). To say that these truths ‘have no existence outside our thought’ is presumably to say that they cannot be perceived through sensation; thus it seems likely that he thought they were innate. Moreover, a few pages later, Descartes groups such axioms with the ideas that in the Meditations are explicitly said to be innate ideas: ‘besides the notions of God and of our mind, we have within us knowledge of many propositions which are eternally true, such as ‘Nothing comes from nothing’’ (CSM I 221/AT VIIIA 38). Given this evidence, and because I can find nothing in the Meditations which suggests that the truths of the natural light are not innate, I think it is likely that the view that they are innate ideas informs that work even though Descartes does not say so explicitly. But what exactly is the relationship between the truths that we perceive by the natural light and the truths that Descartes calls ‘common notions’ or ‘axioms’? A list of ‘Axioms or Common Notions’ appears in the Second Set of Replies (CSM II 116–7/AT VII 165–6), and there is considerable overlap between this list and the propositions that the meditator expressly identifies as perceived by the natural light.5 Because of these similarities to the naturally lit truths of the Meditations, it seems reasonable to conclude that all of the ‘Axioms or Common Notions’ listed in the Second Replies are such that they can be revealed by the natural light.6 On the other hand, Descartes does say, immediately preceding the list of axioms, that ‘many of these axioms could have been better explained, and indeed they should have been introduced as theorems rather than as axioms, had I wished to be more precise’ (CSM II 116/AT VII 164). He seems to mean the scope of ‘many of these axioms’ to extend to the clause about theorems; in other words, only some of the so-called axioms should properly have been

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presented as theorems (that is, I take it, as deduced from other axioms).7 As far as I know, Descartes nowhere else explains why some of these axioms are really theorems; his nonchalance about his imprecision suggests that he is not committed to maintaining that some of the axioms are more basic than others. Given this apparent lack of worry about whether we call the statements on the list axioms or theorems, I believe we should treat the axioms as naturally lit truths. We should also, I think, take those Third Meditation claims which are said to follow immediately from explicitly mentioned truths of the natural light to be perceived by the natural light as well. As we have seen, Descartes also mentions ‘common notions or axioms’ in his Principles of Philosophy, where he writes: But when we recognize that it is impossible for anything to come from nothing, the proposition Nothing comes from nothing is regarded not as a really existing thing, or even as a mode of a thing, but as an eternal truth which resides within our mind. Such truths are termed common notions or axioms. The following are examples of this class: It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same time; What is done cannot be undone; He who thinks cannot but exist while he thinks; and countless others. It would not be easy to draw up a list of all of them; but nonetheless we cannot fail to know them when the occasion for thinking about them arises, provided that we are not blinded by preconceived opinions. (CSM I 209/AT VIIIA 23–4) Here Descartes suggests that these common notions (which are identical to claims said elsewhere to be known by the natural light8) are among the ‘eternal truths.’ In other texts, Descartes gives mathematical claims as examples of eternal truths; yet, as both John Morris and Anthony Kenny have pointed out, Descartes never says that mathematical truths are perceived by the natural light.9 Thus I think we ought to conclude that although the common notions or truths perceived by the natural light are among the eternal truths, the two sets are not identical.

4.2 A Reply to an Objection Someone might object that treating the truths perceived by the natural light as significantly different from other innate ideas, and trying to identify what makes them different, is misguided; such an objector might maintain


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that ‘natural light’ is just another term for ‘reason.’ Kemp Smith, for example, read the natural light in this way. One of his section-headings reads as follows: Understanding: equated by Descartes with the ‘natural light of reason’, i.e. with the power through which alone awareness of any kind whatsoever is possible. Understanding, sense, imagination and memory distinguished from one another not as mental faculties, but only in respect of the type of object upon which the ‘natural light’, i.e. the ‘understanding’, happens to be directed.10 And when John Morris argued, in 1969, that ‘natural light’ has a technical meaning in the Meditations and the Principles of Philosophy,11 Peter Schouls responded the following year by arguing that Morris’ reading provided ‘too narrow a delimitation of Descartes’ use of “natural light.” ’ The technical term in Descartes’ writings, according to Schouls, is actually ‘intuition,’ not ‘natural light.’12 In another article, published two years later, Schouls claims to show that ‘reason’ and ‘natural light’ are equivalent for Descartes.13 The evidence that Schouls adduces in support of this position is Descartes’ remark, in Principles of Philosophy I 30, that the light of nature or faculty of knowledge which God gave us can never encompass any object which is not true in so far as it is indeed encompassed by this faculty, that is, in so far as it is clearly and distinctly perceived. (CSM I 203/AT VIIIA 16) This does seem to suggest that the natural light is just equivalent to the intellect. And, if it is, then it seems that there is nothing special about the truths perceived by the natural light, nothing that distinguishes them from any other truths that we can discover by means of reason. However, I do not think that this reading can be correct. If the natural light is just equivalent to reason, then when Descartes says that ‘whatever is revealed to me by the natural light . . . cannot in any way be open to doubt’ (CSM II 27/AT VII 38), it would presumably be the case that whatever is revealed by reason is also not subject to doubt. We should be able to substitute for ‘natural light’ any of the words Descartes lists in the Second Meditation when he says he now knows that he is ‘a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason’ (CSM II 18/AT VII 27), for if the natural light is equivalent to reason, it should also be equivalent to the things Descartes says are synonyms for reason. But it is simply not true that whatever the intellect

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reveals is not subject to doubt; as we learn in the Fourth Meditation, the intellect can propose all sorts of things to the will. Only a few of those perceptions are so clear and distinct that the will feels compelled to assent. It would also be surprising if it were simply a fluke that, as Kenny points out, ‘principles said to be known by natural light are almost always metaphysical theses rather than mathematical axioms.’14 The principles said to be known by the natural light also include no truths about external objects. Indeed, as we shall see, the truths perceived by the natural light have a special character. It is, of course, possible that Descartes meant to attribute no special status to the truths which he explicitly says are perceived by the natural light, and that he would be willing to include all other truths in that class, too, but it seems to me for the reasons I have given above that this is unlikely. If a plausible account of Descartes’ usage of ‘natural light’ can be given, which can explain why Descartes includes just the truths that he does and not mathematical truths or truths about material objects, then I think there should be no doubt that he used this phrase in a special, technical way. I will argue that the natural light should not be equated with reason or intellect in general, but rather with the pure intellect—although it should be noted that I use ‘pure intellect’ only to rule out the influence of the senses and imagination, and not to rule out any activity of the will. As I will argue, when the natural light ‘shines,’ the use of the intellect is inextricably linked with the use of the will.

4.3 John Morris on the Natural Light In his paper ‘Descartes’ Natural Light,’ John Morris argues that ‘the understanding can be regarded in an active and a passive sense,’15 and that the natural light should be equated with the passive function of the intellect. The natural light, he asserts, is a power of cognition, which contrasts with the ‘active’ power of conceiving. Unlike this power, it does not form ideas, or bring them to consciousness. Instead, it simply gives a click of recognition when a true idea is brought before it.16 However, the textual evidence for Morris’ interpretation of the natural light is slender, and, as we shall see, the texts support a rather different reading.


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In the Fourth Meditation, Descartes draws a distinction between two faculties of mind: intellect and will. Intellect, he says, allows him ‘to perceive the ideas which are subjects for possible judgements’ (CSM II 39/AT VII 56), while the will ‘simply consists in our ability to do or not do something (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or avoid)’ (CSM II 40/AT VII 57). Although he does not say so in the Fourth Meditation, Descartes suggests in two 1641 letters to Regius that the intellect is passive and the will is active; strictly speaking, he says, ‘understanding is the passivity of the mind and willing is its activity’ (CSMK III 182/AT III 372). A few months later, he writes that ‘we should use the term “action” for what plays the role of a moving force, like volition in the mind, while we apply the term “passion” to what plays the role of something moved, like intellection and vision in the same mind’ (CSMK III 199/AT III 454–5). And in the Passions of the Soul Descartes states that while volitions are actions, ‘the various perceptions or modes of knowledge present in us may be called its passions, in a general sense’ (CSM I 335/AT XI 342). In the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, written more than a decade before the Meditations, Descartes identifies two ‘actions of the intellect,’ intuition and deduction [intuitus and deductio] (CSM I 14/AT X 368). If we do not allow for changes in Descartes’ thinking, we might assume that at the time of the Meditations, too, he would be willing to speak of ‘actions of the intellect.’ But Descartes provides no account of the will in the Rules; thus any activity he might have attributed to the mind would have to be included in the role of the intellect. In the Meditations, Descartes’ philosophy of mind has expanded to provide a place for the will, which can take over the active functions previously assigned to the intellect. John Morris’ reading of the role of the natural light in the Meditations takes as its starting-point a passage in the Rules where Descartes claims that the intellect itself, the cognitive power or vis cognoscens, has both active and passive functions; it is, he says, sometimes like a seal, sometimes like wax.17 After describing the various functions of the cognitive power, Descartes concludes that ‘according to its different functions, then, the same power is called either pure intellect, or imagination, or memory, or sense-perception. But when it forms new ideas in the corporeal imagination, or concentrates on those already formed, the proper term for it is “native intelligence” [ingenium]’ (CSM I 42/AT X 416). Morris takes the latter distinction, between forming new ideas and concentrating on alreadyformed ideas, to be spelling out the difference between the active and passive functions of the vis cognoscens,18 and he offers special vocabulary to label these functions: he calls the ability of the intellect to create new ideas

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the ‘power of conceiving,’ and the intellectual function which ‘concentrates on those already formed’ the ‘power of cognition,’ ‘power of knowing,’ or ‘power of recognition.’19 The former is active, while the latter is passive. There are several problems with this reading. First, it is not clear that Descartes means to equate the active and passive functions of the vis cognoscens with the two functions he calls ingenium. The functions of ingenium seem rather to be two uses among several to which the cognitive power can be put. Furthermore, ingenium is explicitly said to be concerned with ideas in the corporeal imagination [phantasia], and Descartes appears to contrast it with the cognitive ability ‘when it acts on its own’—that is, with pure intellect (CSM I 42/AT X 416). The natural light, we shall see, involves the operation of pure intellect, and does not require turning to the imagination in any way. Hence it cannot be equivalent to either the passive or the active aspect of the ‘native intelligence’ Descartes mentions here. Moreover, there is no evidence that Descartes continued, after the time of the Rules, to maintain that the intellect itself had active and passive roles. In an earlier article, ‘Raison, Connaissance and Conception in Descartes’ Méditations,’ Morris concedes that the December 1641 letter to Regius indicates that ‘Descartes seems to have rejected the use of the terms “action” and “passion” as he used them in the Regulae, to apply to the power to bring ideas into the mind, and the power to consider ideas.’20 Nonetheless, Morris asserts that Descartes ‘has retained an analysis of the understanding in which these two powers represent its two fundamental activities.’21 As we shall see, Morris claims that in the French translation of the Meditations, Descartes retained his original Rules distinction between two operations of ingenium, a power of conceiving and a power of recognizing. However, we shall also see that Morris offers little evidence for his assertion that the faculties identified in the French Meditations are, respectively, active and passive. And Morris provides no further evidence in either article to support his claim that Descartes held, after the time of the Rules, that the understanding itself can be both active and passive. Finally, it is misleading of Morris to state that that aspect of the understanding which engages in concept-formation ‘is called’ the power of conceiving, and that the passive aspect ‘is called’ the power of cognition or power of knowing, for this implies that Descartes himself has explicitly distinguished and labeled the two. Although Morris does not explain his reasons for this assertion in ‘Descartes’ Natural Light,’ he does so in ‘Raison, Connaissance and Conception in Descartes’ Méditations,’ arguing that the French words connaissance and connaître are best rendered as ‘recognition’ and ‘recognize,’ rather than as ‘knowledge’ and ‘know,’ since


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French distinguishes the verb connaître from savoir.22 Morris uses connaissance and connaître to express the passive function of the intellect. He then proposes to take the French concevoir and Latin percipere as ‘conceive,’ the supposedly active function which allows one ‘to bring an idea or concept before the mind.’23 As evidence that Descartes himself drew such a distinction, Morris points not only to the Rules passage we have already examined, but also to the French translation of the Meditations, particularly the Fourth Meditation. However, a closer look at the French passages will show that, here, too, Morris’ reading has little support. Morris’ strategy is first to ‘show that conceiving and recognizing are functions of the understanding,’ and then to argue that conceiving is active and recognizing is passive.24 His evidence for the first claim is the French version of the Fourth Meditation passage in which Descartes distinguishes the intellect from the will. Descartes indeed refers to a puissance de connoistre, which he equates with the entendement, or understanding, and to a puissance d’élire, or volonté, will (AT IX 45). Thus the puissance de connoistre seems to be equivalent to the understanding in general. On the next page, Descartes refers to ‘la puissance d’entendre ou de concevoir’ (AT IX 46); again, the puissance de concevoir is equated with the understanding. In other words, connoistre and concevoir both seem to pertain to the understanding in general, not to distinct parts of the understanding. Moreover, Descartes characterizes the entendement, which he has just equated with the puissance de connoistre, as that by which he perceives ideas; in the Latin original he uses the verb percipio (AT VII 56), and in the French translation it is conçoy (AT IX 45). But, as we have seen, Morris wants to match instances of the verbs concevoir and percipere with the supposedly active puissance de concevoir, and not with the supposedly passive puissance de connoistre. Clearly, the passage at AT IX 45 flies in the face of Morris’ interpretation. Later on that page, Descartes refers to ‘la faculté de concevoir.’ If Morris is right, then Descartes presumably means to contrast this faculty with the faculté de connoistre mentioned a few lines earlier, and to contrast both of those (as parts of the intellect) with the will. But in fact it seems that Descartes’ reference to the faculté de concevoir is meant to spell out in greater detail what is involved in the puissance de connoistre, for Descartes is saying that if he considers either ‘la faculté de concevoir’ or ‘la memoire, ou l’imagination, ou quelqu’autre puissance,’ he finds that all are limited, while only his will appears unlimited. He thus seems to be grouping the various faculties of intellect and opposing them to the will; since, earlier in the paragraph, he also opposed intellect to will, it seems plausible to read

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the faculties of conceiving, memory, and imagination as types of knowing. If this is right, then by puissance de connoistre Descartes is referring in the most general way to the understanding or intellect, and not to a particular function of the intellect. The passage at AT IX 45 seems to be Morris’ main evidence for his claim that the passive role of the understanding is the puissance de connoistre, but he also mentions in a footnote to his article that the reader should see the passages at AT IX 57 and 63.25 The first of these passages is in the opening paragraph of the Sixth Meditation, where the meditator remarks, ‘when I give more attentive consideration to what imagination is, it seems to be nothing else but an application of the cognitive faculty [facultatis cognoscitivae] to a body which is intimately present to it, and which therefore exists’ (CSM II 50/AT VII 71–2). The Latin facultatis cognoscitivae is rendered as ‘la faculté qui connoist’ in the French translation, but this passage in no way suggests that this faculty is passive. The passage at AT IX 63, also in the Sixth Meditation, does use the word connoistre (cognoscendi in the Latin) in connection with a faculty which the meditator explicitly identifies as passive: ‘Now there is in me a passive faculty of sensory perception, that is, a faculty for receiving and recognizing the ideas of sensible objects’ (CSM II 55/AT VII 79). This passage might supply slightly more reason to think that words like connoistre and cognosco always have a passive connotation in the Meditations, except that in this passage Descartes mentions receiving as well as recognizing; so it seems possible that it is the ‘receiving’ which is being characterized as passive, and not the ‘recognizing.’ Thus it seems that there is really no textual evidence for Morris’ claims that Descartes distinguished two functions of understanding, that these ‘are called’ the power of recognizing and the power of conceiving, and that they are, respectively, passive and active. A further problem with Morris’ reading is that it seems very odd to say that cases of percipere are active, for this has the result that when Descartes says things like ‘Now all that the intellect does is to enable me to perceive [percipio] the ideas which are subjects for possible judgments’ (CSM II 39/ AT VII 56), or ‘the perception [perceptionis] of the intellect should always precede the determination of the will’ (CSM II 41/AT VII 60), he is portraying the intellect as acting. For support, Morris points out that in the wax passage, Descartes refers to ‘the perception I have of it, or rather the act whereby it is perceived’ (CSM II 21/AT VII 31).26 However, Morris should have noted that this gloss on ‘perception’ appears only in the French translation (AT IX 24). We have already seen that Descartes’ Fourth Meditation distinction between intellect and will is plausibly read as a distinction


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between a passive and an active power of mind, that Descartes says in The Passions of the Soul that perceptions of the mind are passive, and that there is no evidence to suggest that Descartes’ claim in the Rules that the ‘knowing power’ has active and passive functions can be read into the Meditations. There is only one sense in which it is correct to say that for Descartes, the intellect has both active and passive functions. In the Fourth Meditation, the meditator distinguishes the intellect [intellectus] from the will [voluntas], and I have argued that although he does not say so there, Descartes takes the intellect to be passive and the will to be active. But before the Fourth Meditation, the meditator has used intellectus as a synonym for mind; in the Second Meditation, for example, he declares that ‘I am in the strict sense only a thing that thinks; that is, I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason [id est, mens, sive animus, sive intellectus, sive ratio]’ (CSM II 18/AT VII 27). In this case, ‘intellect’ refers to the complex that turns out, in the Fourth Meditation, to include the two faculties of will and intellect in the strict sense. In other words, intellectus has both a narrow and a broad sense. Intellectus in the broad sense includes whatever pertains to the mind, ruling out only that which pertains to the body and its senses; while intellectus in the narrow sense excludes both the will and the bodily senses.27 Now, insofar as the will can be included in the broader sense of intellect, it could be appropriate to say that some intellectual processes are active. Indeed, many uses of the mind, for Descartes, do involve the activity of the will; the will passes judgment on the perceptions in the intellect, and the will is presumably also involved when one exercises one’s imagination by joining two or more ideas together, or when one makes inferences, or engages in the process of analysis. And consider Descartes’ remark in The Passions of the Soul: When our soul applies itself to imagine something non-existent—as in thinking about an enchanted palace or a chimera—and also when it applies itself to consider something that is purely intelligible and not imaginable—for example, in considering its own nature—the perceptions it has of these things depend chiefly on the volition which makes it aware of them. That is why we usually regard these perceptions as actions rather than passions. (CSM I 336/AT XI 344) Descartes does not deny that perceptions of purely intelligible things do indeed require a volition. The role of this volition is evidently to direct the

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intellect’s attention; later in the Passions, Descartes describes how volitions can, through their ‘power to make the [pineal] gland move,’ lead us to have various perceptions in the intellect (CSM I 344/AT XI 361). These, then, are examples of intellectual processes which can be called active insofar as the will is involved.

4.4 The Natural Light and the Role of the Will After distinguishing between the active and passive functions of intellect, Morris argues that we should identify the natural light with the passive function of recognition. To do this, he must show that the natural light is itself a passive faculty. He states: According to this analysis, the natural light is a ‘passive’ function, a power of cognition, which contrasts with the ‘active’ power of conceiving. Unlike this power, it does not form ideas, or bring them to consciousness. Instead, it simply gives a click of recognition when a true idea is brought before it; Descartes invariably uses it in expressions like ‘I recognize (connais) by the natural light.’ He could never say, ‘I conceive by the natural light’; conceiving simply isn’t the sort of function that the natural light performs.28 Morris provides no further argument. Thus his evidence for the claim that the natural light is passive apparently consists entirely in the putative fact that Descartes typically says ‘I recognize [connais] by the natural light,’ where we must understand connais in the passive sense which Morris attributes to it. I have already argued that connoistre does not have the technical meaning, contrasting with the sense of concevoir, that Morris attributes to it. Furthermore, neither the French nor the Latin versions of the Meditations support Morris’ claim about how Descartes uses the phrase ‘natural light.’29 The French translation does use personal pronouns more than the Latin version, especially the first person plural pronoun, which does not appear at all in the original Latin.30 However, only one of the seven cases of truths said to be revealed by the natural light in the Meditations actually takes the form ‘I recognize by the natural light,’ and this is true only of the French translation. The passage occurs in the Sixth Meditation, when the meditator refers to ‘une infinité d’autres semblables, que je connais par la lumière naturelle sans l’aide du corps’ (AT IX 65). The original Latin reads ‘reliqua


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omnia quae lumine naturali sunt nota’ (AT VII 82), and all the other accounts of truths revealed by the natural light in the Latin text are of the form ‘X is manifest/perspicuous/known/shown by the natural light.’ These constructions are indeed passive, but that need not imply that the natural light is itself passive. ‘The natural light’ in all these examples is in the ablative case, which in Latin is often used to express the means by which an action is accomplished. But Descartes’ definition of action as ‘whatever takes place or occurs . . . with regard to that which makes it happen’ (CSM I 328/AT XI 328) can be applied even to things which lack their own motive force, such as tools. So this is inconclusive evidence for settling the question of whether the natural light is active or passive. In the Fourth Meditation, the meditator equates the natural light with the ‘power of understanding [vim intelligendi]’ (CSM II 42/AT VII 60). We then learn in the Sixth Meditation that ‘when the mind understands [intelligit], it in some way turns toward itself and inspects one of the ideas which are within it’ (CSM II 51/AT VII 73). Understanding is here contrasted with the imagination, in which the mind ‘looks at something in the body which conforms to an idea understood by the mind or perceived by the senses’ (CSM II 51/AT VII 73). Margaret Wilson points out that Descartes’ distinction between pure understanding and imagination exemplifies a theme which runs throughout Descartes’ work, ‘the contrast between strictly intellectual acts and mental acts involving reference to physical states.’31 Thus, in calling the natural light the vim intelligendi, Descartes is associating it with the clear and distinct perception of the pure intellect, and not with sensory-perception or imagination, which involve the body.32 Moreover, in the Fifth Meditation, the meditator says that truths revealed by the natural light ‘belong to the mind alone’—that is, that he knows these truths without any use of his senses (CSM II 57/AT VII 82).33 The meditator also differentiates the power of understanding or pure intellect from the will. As we have seen, he says in the Fourth Meditation that the intellect enables us to perceive ideas, which are the subjects for possible judgments, while the will is our ability to affirm or deny those ideas (CSM II 39–40/AT VII 56–7). We’ve also seen evidence that Descartes holds that intellect is passive and will is active.34 Thus it seems we should conclude that ‘natural light’ means the passive perception of things by the pure intellect. But I think this would be an oversimplification. Descartes’ more considered opinion is that the operations of intellect and will actually depend on each other. In God, intellect and will are in fact not distinct at all; the act by which God understands something is also the very act by which he wills it.35

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In human thinkers, Descartes says that understanding and willing occur ‘by means of operations that are in a certain sense [quodammodo] distinct from one another’ (CSM I 201/AT VIIIA 14), but that the distinction is not a real one. Descartes states in the Principles that two things are really distinct when we can clearly and distinctly understand them apart from each other (CSM I 213/AT VIIIA 28), which shows us that they are really separable by God. The only things that are distinct in this sense are substances—mind and body. Intellect and will, however, are both modes of thought. They are only conceptually distinct, which means that we cannot clearly and distinctly think of one if we separate it from the other (CSM I 214–5/AT VIIIA 30), and so they are not really separable. Thus, although Descartes tells his correspondent Regius that understanding is passive and volition is active, he goes on to say that ‘because we cannot will anything without understanding what we will, and we scarcely ever understand something without at the same time willing something, we do not easily distinguish in this matter passivity from activity’ (CSMK III 182/AT III 372). One role of the will which scholastics like Thomas Aquinas emphasized is to direct the attention of the intellect.36 Descartes also assigns such a role to the will,37 for he says in the Passions of the Soul that a prior volition is necessary for the soul to think of purely intelligible, non-imaginable things (CSM I 336/AT XI 344). Perception by the natural light is perception of something purely intelligible; it thus involves a volitional act to direct the attention of the pure intellect. In the Sixth Meditation account of pure intellect, Descartes says that when the mind understands, it ‘in some way turns towards itself’ in order to consider its own ideas (CSM II 51/AT VII 73). In order for the intellect to turn towards itself, the will must direct the intellect’s attention. And, since Descartes says that we tend to regard such perceptions as actions, not passions, it seems we can consider the operation of the natural light to be active, too. Perception by the natural light is not just preceded by an act of will; it is also inevitably followed by an act of will. Here, too, Descartes’ account of the will resembles, in certain respects, the Thomistic account of the relationship between the intellect and the will.38 According to Aquinas, the human will necessarily aims at the good.39 The intellect presents various things to the will as good, and, should the will choose to act, it must, when presented with something conceived as good, pursue that thing. Aquinas is careful to emphasize that this does not mean that the will always necessarily pursues what it pursues. In the first place, the will can refrain from pursuing some good by redirecting the intellect’s attention away from that good.


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As Eleonore Stump puts it, ‘There is nothing in this life that invariably and ineluctably moves every human will to the exercise of its act, because it is always in a person’s power to refuse to think of the thing at issue.’40 In the second place, even if the will does keep the intellect’s attention focused on some good, the will’s pursuit of that thing is, in almost all cases, not necessary. Stump writes, As far as the specification of its act is concerned, there is no object, other than happiness in this life and God in the next, which by its nature necessarily moves every human will to want that. . . . On Aquinas’s account, the will wills only what the intellect presents at that time as good under some description. . . . Besides happiness and the vision of God, all other things are such that they can in principle be considered good under some descriptions and not good under others, so that there is nothing about them which must constrain the will of any agent always to want them.41 The exceptions, then, are the pursuit of happiness and the vision of God; these things are desired necessarily. What is special about these cases is that there are no circumstances under which the thing in question could be presented as not good.42 For example, those in heaven have such a clear view of the goodness of God that they cannot help but will it. Aquinas thinks that although these acts of will are necessary, they are also free acts, for they are not necessary in the sense of being coerced.43 Descartes gives what is fundamentally a Thomistic account when he describes the relationship between clear and distinct perception and the will. For Aquinas, when we clearly perceive happiness, we find we are compelled to pursue it. Descartes extends Aquinas’ account to clear and distinct perception in general. Thus when the intellect presents a clear and distinct proposition, Descartes says, the will cannot help but act. And, like Aquinas, Descartes holds that although the will itself is necessitated in such cases, it is nonetheless free. In fact, Descartes goes even further than Aquinas, claiming that in these cases the will is in fact acting with the highest degree of freedom. As he puts it in the Fourth Meditation, In order to be free, there is no need for me to be inclined both ways; on the contrary, the more I incline in one direction—either because I clearly understand that reasons of truth and goodness point that way, or because of a divinely produced disposition of my inmost thoughts—the freer is my choice. (CSM II 40/AT VII 57–8)

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Thus his freest judgments are those in which he feels moved simply by his own mind to assent to or deny some proposition. But this is just what happens when the natural light shines in the intellect. The meditator goes on to say, . . . during these past few days I have been asking whether anything in the world exists, and I have realized that from the very fact of my raising this question it follows quite evidently that I exist. I could not but judge that something which I understood so clearly was true; but this was not because I was compelled so to judge by any external force, but because a great light in the intellect was followed by a great inclination in the will. (CSM II 41/AT VII 58–9) The proposition here referred to is one that he has already explicitly said, earlier in the Meditations, was shown by the natural light. In other words, the meditator is describing what happens when he perceives something by the natural light: there is such a great inclination in the will that he cannot help but assent. Again, he says in a 1644 letter that ‘it seems certain to me that a great light in the intellect is followed by a great inclination in the will; so that if we see very clearly that a thing is good for us, it is very difficult—and, on my view, impossible, as long as one continues in the same thought—to stop the course of our desire’ (CSMK III 233/AT IV 115–6). Thus, in the operation of the natural light more than any other mental process, human beings most closely resemble God, in whom intellect and will are not distinct. When the natural light shines in the intellect, the activity of the will spontaneously and inevitably follows. The ‘light’ occurs only in the intellect, as the idea is perceived, but the action of the will cannot be separated from the light. It is impossible, Descartes would say, for someone to perceive the idea and not assent.44 We have seen that perception by the natural light involves a prior act of will, in order to direct the intellect’s attention, and that Descartes says that in such cases we tend to call the perception an action. Descartes might also think that we tend to regard a perception as an action if that perception is inevitably followed by a volition. Because the operation of the natural light is inseparable from the operation of the active will, we are entitled to call the natural light, more broadly speaking, active, even though strictly speaking Descartes only identifies it with the passive pure intellect. In other words, we should consider the natural light less strictly than just as the passive clear and distinct perception of some proposition in the intellect. Since perception by the natural light cannot be separated from the acts of volition that


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both precede and follow it, the ‘natural light,’ understood more broadly, refers to this series of mental operations, and not just to the perception itself. This reading contrasts with John Morris’ interpretation of the natural light in an important way, for Morris ignores the role of the will in his account. Indeed, if his account were right, it would render the will superfluous in Descartes’ system. Morris maintains that the passive power of knowing or recognizing, the natural light, allows us to ‘recognize truth or falsehood,’ and that the natural light ‘simply gives a click of recognition when a true idea is brought before it.’45 But consider the passage cited above from the Fourth Meditation, in which the meditator asserts that his freest choices are those when he inclines to one direction ‘either because I clearly understand that reasons of truth and goodness point that way, or because of a divinely produced disposition of my inmost thoughts’ (CSM II 40/AT VII 57–8). On a reading like Morris’, Descartes would be read as suggesting that the will is wholly inclined to assent to a claim when—and because—the understanding already recognizes that the claim is true. And if that is so, then it seems a judgment has somehow already been made, before the will enters the picture. But Descartes emphasizes at the end of the Fourth Meditation that it is on the basis of the clarity and distinctness of a proposition that one judges that proposition to be true; the former are criteria of the latter. When we perceive certain objective truths, our perception has ‘transparent clarity [perspicuitatem cognitionis]’ (CSM II 135/AT VII 192; see also CSM II 104/AT VII 145–6); but the recognition that it is true only occurs when the will assents. On the reading which Morris seems forced to give, Descartes’ distinction between clarity and distinctness on the one hand and truth on the other hand collapses. Perhaps one might try to cash out Morris’ characterization of the natural light as the faculty which gives a ‘click of recognition’ when an idea is true by invoking the role of the will, for what could such a ‘click’ be, if not assent to the truth of a proposition? But such an elaboration of Morris’ view would be incoherent, since he thinks both that the natural light is passive and that the natural light is what gives the ‘click’; but only the active Cartesian will can give anything like a ‘click.’ Indeed, the natural light should not be taken as a power of recognition at all, for any such interpretation opens the door to an infinite regress: to recognize that some perception is clear and distinct is presumably to judge that it is clear and distinct, and so a judgment seems to be necessary even before the perception is judged to be true.46 But Descartes himself does not characterize the natural light as ‘recognizing’ anything; that is simply

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Morris’ vocabulary. Rather, we should read Descartes as saying that particularly clear and distinct perception makes the intellect seem to be illuminated by a great light, and the assent of the will invariably follows. In sum, the natural light is not, as Morris claims, a ‘power of cognition, which contrasts with the “active” power of conceiving’ and which gives a ‘click of recognition when a true idea is brought before it.’ I have argued that the natural light is indeed passive, but that this is because Descartes associates it with the ‘power of understanding [vim intelligendi],’ where that is contrasted with the will. However, the natural light is very closely tied to the operation of the will, and thus there is one sense in which it is appropriate to say that the natural light is active. Indeed, attending to the fact that Descartes characterizes this special function of the mind by means of a metaphor of light provides some further reason to think that he would be willing to say that perception by the natural light is a kind of mental action. This will be the subject of the next section.

4.5 The Metaphor of Light We might be able to learn something about Descartes’ use of the phrase ‘natural light’ by considering what he says about physical light. Descartes’ use of the phrase lumen naturale is certainly metaphorical; he does not literally mean that this mental faculty is a type of light. But given Descartes’ interest and research in optics, it is hard to imagine that his use of a light metaphor was not informed by his views on the nature of light. Yet perhaps we should bear in mind the meditator’s rejection of the use of the imagination in order to understand his nature. In the Second Meditation, the meditator concludes that attempting to use his imagination to learn what he is would be ‘silly,’ and that ‘none of the things that the imagination enables me to grasp is at all relevant to this knowledge of myself which I possess’ (CSM II 19/AT VII 28). This might suggest that Descartes would not want his readers to try to draw conclusions about the natural light by examining the nature of physical light, an exercise that would indeed involve the imagination. To try to understand the natural light by picturing some type of mental ‘light’ might be going about it the wrong way, making use of the imagination when in fact ‘the mind must . . . be most carefully diverted from such things if it is to perceive its own nature as distinctly as possible’ (CSM II 29/AT VII 28). Furthermore, Descartes emphasizes that the meditator starts the Meditations very much as a ‘man in the street,’ whose views reflect common sense


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and an Aristotelian education.47 Such a meditator might well have been accustomed to using the phrase ‘natural light’ without any deep understanding of the nature of that mental faculty. Although the meditator has acquired some philosophical sophistication by the Third Meditation—for merely the recognition that he has a ‘natural light’ is an improvement over the First Meditation, where he exhibits no knowledge of it—perhaps he is not yet fully freed from his pre-philosophical instincts and customs, so that his reliance on this phrase merely signals an unreflective use of a popular phrase. If this reading is right, then the meditator’s use of the phrase ‘natural light’ might simply reflect reliance on popular custom, and not any considered view about ways in which the metaphor of light is particularly apt. However, Descartes invokes the ‘natural light’ in his Replies to the Objections to the Meditations, the Principles of Philosophy, The Search for Truth, and his correspondence, which seems to suggest that he found this phrase appropriate for expressing the nature of the special ability he described by it. Still, given that philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas had long used light metaphors to describe intellectual understanding, and given that the phrase ‘natural light’ had become especially popular during the early seventeenth century, Descartes, like his meditator, could be merely bowing to custom, using the language he felt would be most easily understood by his readers, just as he said he used the word ‘idea’ because ‘it was the standard philosophical term used to refer to the forms of perception belonging to the divine mind’ (CSM II 127/AT VII 181). In his Replies to Hobbes, after all, he says that ‘As everyone knows, a “light in the intellect” means transparent clarity of cognition’ (CSM II 135/AT VII 192). This might suggest that he adopted a similar phrase simply from convenience, and not because he thought that our having such cognitions actually bears any resemblance to light. Since Descartes is generally silent about the phrase ‘natural light’ and why he used it, it is extremely difficult to settle these issues. The solution I find most reasonable is to assume that Descartes would not have used the phrase ‘natural light’ if he had found it extremely objectionable; if he had thought it was encumbered with unwanted scholastic connotations, he would undoubtedly have said so at some point. In fact, because Descartes was generally very attentive to language, and had a special interest in optics and light throughout his life, I believe he most likely did reflect upon the connection between the metaphorical natural light and real physical light. Thus Descartes’ use of the phrase was probably not unreflective. For these reasons, I think we can legitimately examine Descartes’ views on physical light in order to try to explicate the concept of the natural light.

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In the Optics, Descartes states that the light in ‘luminous bodies’ is ‘a certain movement, or a very rapid and lively action, which passes to our eyes through the medium of the air and other transparent bodies’ (CSMK I 153/AT VI 84). Light, then, is active rather than passive; it actively illuminates objects. This provides additional reason for thinking that there is a sense of ‘natural light’ which is active. Just as light acts on our eyes, the illumination of the intellect by the natural light necessitates the assent of the will. Since Descartes thinks of light as active, we would expect him to think of vision as passive. That is, external sources of light illuminate objects and our eyes, and vision, as the recipient of light from some external source, is passive. And indeed, this is how Descartes explains almost all cases of vision. As we have already seen, in his 1642 letter to Regius, Descartes says that ‘we apply the term “passion” to what plays the role of something moved, like intellection and vision in the same mind’ (CSMK III 199/AT III 455). Vision, then is passive; the eyes are acted upon by light. But, curiously, Descartes provides another account of vision, too. He writes that we must acknowledge that the objects of sight can be perceived not only by means of the action in them which is directed towards our eyes, but also by the action in our eyes which is directed towards them. Nevertheless, because the latter action is nothing other than light, we must note that it is found only in the eyes of those creatures which can see in the dark, such as cats, whereas a man normally sees only through the action which comes from the objects. (CSM I 154/AT VI 86; my emphasis) Never mind that Descartes quite misunderstood feline vision; the important point is that he thinks vision is active when the eyes produce their own light. In the realm of the intellect, on this model, the mind itself would be the active source of its own illumination. Given these two accounts of the relation between vision and light, how should we understand the relation between intellectual perception and the natural light? If the natural light follows the first model of vision, Descartes would be in the tradition of Plato and Augustine, for whom the source of intellectual illumination is outside the mind. In Book Six of the Republic, for example, Plato compares the form of the Good to the sun.48 Light emanates from the sun, rendering things seen; the source of light, the sun, is external to us, as is the form of the Good. This is also true of Augustine, who proposed that truth is revealed to human beings through divine illumination.


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Augustine often refers to a passage from the New Testament Book of John which characterizes Jesus as ‘the true light that enlightens every man.’49 God illuminates our minds by giving us a light which ‘participates’ in the divine light.50 On this kind of reading of the natural light, Descartes would be suggesting that the human mind perceives truths when it is illuminated by some other, higher light. If Descartes were really in the Platonic and Augustinian traditions, he ought to identify the natural light with something other than the human mind itself. But Descartes’ natural light is a natural light, part of our own nature and not something supernatural or separate from ourselves. Descartes emphasizes this in a couple of texts. In the Second Set of Replies, he distinguishes the natural light from the ‘clarity or transparency which . . . comes from divine grace’ (CSM II 105/AT VII 147–8). The latter, he says, consists in a certain inner light which comes from God, and when we are supernaturally illuminated by it we are confident that what is put forward for us to believe has been revealed by God himself. And it is quite impossible for him to lie; this is more certain than any natural light, and is often even more evident because of the light of grace. (CSM II 105/AT VII 148) Again, in a 1648 letter (probably to Silhon) he writes of what our knowledge of God ‘in the beatific vision’ after death will be like, contrasting it with the way we now know God. The former will be a kind of ‘intuitive knowledge [connoissance intuitive],’ which he says is an illumination of the mind, by which it sees in the light of God whatever it pleases him to show it by a direct impress of the divine clarity on our understanding, which in this is not considered as an agent but simply as a receiver of the rays of divinity. (CSMK III 331/AT V 136) The implicit contrast here is with a kind of mental illumination in which the understanding is an agent, and not merely a passive recipient of light. Thus, Descartes seems to be in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, in which the source of mental illumination is a mental faculty of our own, rather than God himself. According to Aquinas’ account of knowledge, when we perceive a thing, we fix its intelligible species, which is a likeness of the thing, in the potential intellect, whose function is to receive intelligible species that have already been abstracted.51 The potential intellect, which Aquinas equates with the memory,52 thus gradually gets stocked with the

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intelligible species of perceived objects. It is the active intellect which detaches, or ‘abstracts,’ these species from objects.53 And Aquinas explicitly links the active intellect with light, referring to ‘the light of the active intellect.’54 Of course, since God is the creator of the human intellect, Aquinas does not conceive of the agent intellect as independent of God. Nonetheless, there is a difference between being directly illuminated by God, and being illuminated by a mental faculty created by God, and both Descartes and Aquinas conceive of human intellection as an instance of the latter. So it is Aquinas’ use of the light metaphor to characterize the abstractive active intellect which I believe is behind Descartes’ use of the phrase ‘natural light.’ There are of course major differences between the Thomistic and Cartesian accounts of knowledge. Most notably, Descartes rejects the scholastic account of knowledge as involving abstraction from sense-perceptions. Instead, he thinks, our minds are innately stocked with various concepts and truths. But despite these differences, there are several similarities between Descartes’ account of the natural light and the Thomistic active intellect. First, Descartes’ conception of the natural light as a naturally endowed function of the mind puts him closer to Aquinas than to Augustine or Plato. Second, as I have already argued, the Cartesian natural light in the strict sense of pure understanding is inseparably connected with the operation of the will, and thus in a wider sense can be characterized as active, like the active intellect. Finally, I want to propose that in referring to the ‘natural light,’ Descartes is describing a process of thought by which the attention of the intellect is directed, by the will, to our own mental experiences. In attending to our own particular experience of thinking, we thereby clearly and distinctly perceive certain general propositions. As Descartes puts it in the Second Set of Replies, ‘it is the nature of our mind to construct general propositions on the basis of our knowledge of particular ones’ (CSM II 100/AT VII 140–1).55 Descartes’ choice of the phrase ‘natural light’ to characterize the ability to ‘construct’ general propositions in this way was surely inspired by Aquinas’ use of light metaphors to describe the active intellect’s ability to abstract intelligible species from our sensory experiences. In a letter of July 1638, Descartes refers to ‘an ambiguity in the word “light,” ’ and writes that ‘the action of subtle matter, which is lumen, is not an action of luminous bodies, which is lux’ (CSMK III 109/AT II 204). While classical Latin does not distinguish between lux and lumen, a conceptual distinction between these two terms was common in medieval optics. In the Latin translation of Avicenna, for example, lux refers to the brightness


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by which fiery objects (such as the sun) are visible, and lumen to the light which emanates from lux and makes nonluminous objects visible.56 We might, say, roughly, that the source of light is lux, while the light-rays which emanate from it are lumen.57 Descartes makes essentially the same distinction earlier in the letter, where he says that ‘the sort of light which can be seen in transparent bodies’ is light which ‘philosophers call lumen,’ while ‘the light which can be seen in luminous bodies . . . they call lux’ (CSMK III 108–9/AT II 203). Since the Optics was written in French, Descartes uses only the word ‘lumière,’ but he does distinguish between ‘the light of a luminous body’ and ‘the rays of light’ (CSM I 155/AT VI 88). By thus distinguishing the source of light from the rays which emanate from it, he seems to be alluding to the medieval distinction between lux and lumen. Now, every reference to the natural light in the Meditations, and most references elsewhere, use the phrase lumen naturale rather than lux.58 But if the mind is its own source of light, then according to Descartes’ characterizations of lux and lumen, surely the natural light ought to be a case of lux. Why, then, does Descartes speak of lumen naturale instead of lux naturale? One possibility is that by using the word lumen, Descartes is referring to the ‘rays’ of the natural light, the light which is (metaphorically) sent out by the mind, rather than to the mind itself. Another possibility is suggested by the fact that Descartes’ special interest in the Optics is how light-rays are reflected and refracted. Refraction occurs, he says, when light-rays ‘fall obliquely on the surface of a transparent body [cors transparent] and penetrate this body more or less easily than the body from which they came’ (CSM I 156/AT VI 92–3). Descartes calls the light which gets refracted by transparent bodies lumen; and, interestingly, Descartes sometimes uses the word ‘transparent’ [perspicuus] to describe the truths revealed by the natural light. Thus, it is possible that Descartes characterizes the natural light as a form of lumen because he wants to suggest the connection between this ‘light’ and those truths which are ‘transparent.’ In sum, Descartes’ use of the light metaphor seems to reinforce the view that the natural light is an active power of the mind—but we must remember that this is just because the natural light is so closely tied to the activity of the will, which is active. Descartes clearly thought that physical light was active, and he held that there was a type of vision which was itself active, insofar as the eyes produced their own light. The natural light, then, is a form of intellection which is to some extent like active, light-producing vision.

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4.6 Conclusion I have argued against John Morris’ interpretation of the Cartesian natural light as a passive power which gives a ‘click’ of recognition when it is presented with truths; the evidence that Morris marshalls in favor of his reading simply does not support his view. The only text which seems to support any part of Morris’ interpretation is the meditator’s explicit identification of the natural light with the ‘power of understanding,’ the pure intellect (CSM II 42/AT VII 60), which Descartes considers to be passive. I have argued, however, that the recognition of truths by the natural light is so closely tied with the action of the will that there is a sense in which the natural light can be called active. Moreover, since Descartes holds that physical light is active, and since, as I have argued, it is implausible that his use of the metaphor of light was not influenced by his views on physical light, this is good reason to look for an interpretation according to which the natural light is, in some sense, active. When the natural light ‘shines,’ the will immediately assents to the truth of the proposition being considered; the propositions perceived by the natural light are therefore judgments. In the next chapter, I will consider just what these judgments are about.

Chapter 5

The Natural Light and Its Truths

Descartes says that the natural light shines when the will feels itself compelled to assent to some proposition which is perceived particularly clearly and distinctly. But he does not characterize all innate ideas as ‘perceived by the natural light’—only those that are perceived by the pure intellect. As we will see, most of the truths that Descartes says are perceived by the natural light concern the purely intellectual or common simple natures. I will defend the view that when Descartes says that some truth is perceived by the natural light, he means that that truth is discovered through the use of the pure intellect as it attends to its own process of thinking.1 This interpretation of the natural light fits into the general theory of Cartesian innateness already developed in Chapters 1 through 3, for, as we saw in Chapter 4, the truths which Descartes says are revealed by the natural light are one kind of innate idea. As we have seen, Descartes holds that God has created the human mind to contain various innate ideas from the moment that we begin to think, even though we may not be explicitly aware that these ideas are in our minds. That is, the fact that our minds contain these ideas means that we have correlative faculties or capacities to perceive those innate ideas, but not that we necessarily exercise these faculties. With effort, we can overcome our natural propensity to focus our attention on ideas of sense-perception, using the will to direct the attention of the intellect so that the innate ideas are perceived. This account can also be extended to apply to the innate ideas that Descartes says are perceived by the natural light. I begin to present his account in Section 2, and in Section 3 I apply it to some specific examples of truths perceived by the natural light.

5.1 Perception by the Natural Light Like other innate ideas, truths perceived by the natural light are ideas of which we are implicitly aware because they are relied on in our thought.

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Because we rely on these principles in thought, attending to our thoughts will bring them to light. Descartes often stresses the role of attention in our perception of truths by the natural light. For example, in the Third Meditation, after reaching the conclusion that God exists, the meditator says: Nor is there actually anything in all these things which is not manifest by the natural light when I attend carefully [diligenter attendenti]. But when I attend less, and images of sensible things blind my mental vision, it is not easy to remember why the idea of a being more perfect than me must necessarily proceed from some being which is in truth more perfect. (my translation; AT VII 47) Later in the Third Meditation, the meditator learns another naturally lit truth by attentively considering [attendenti] the nature of time (CSM II 33/AT VII 49). And in the Fourth Set of Replies, he speaks of ‘guiding the natural light so that we perspicaciously attend to [certain matters] [ad lumen naturale ita dirigendum, ut ista perspicue advertamus]’ (my translation; AT VII 241). Not all innate ideas are perceived by the natural light, however; the truths perceived by the natural light are only a subset of the set of innate ideas. Descartes’ own examples of things perceived by the natural light share two features which set them apart from other innate ideas. First, what the natural light perceives, is, in almost every case, a proposition. Thus, while Descartes says that the non-propositional concepts ‘thing,’ ‘truth,’ ‘thought,’ and ‘God’ are innate, he never says that they are perceived by the natural light. It is not surprising that the natural light perceives only ideas that are in propositional form, however. As we saw in Chapter 4, Descartes says that the natural light shines when the intellect perceives something so clearly and distinctly that the mind is as if flooded with light, and the will immediately assents to the truth of that perception. The natural light is said to shine, then, when a certain kind of judgment is made, and to make a judgment requires that the intellect be entertaining some proposition. Nevertheless, the perception of the common and purely intellectual simple notions themselves could also be characterized as perceived by the natural light. The meditator’s explicit perception of a purely intellectual or common concept is a non-propositional affair; he says in the Third Meditation, for example, that he understands what truth is, and what thought is, but there is no particular proposition to which he has assented which expresses his explicit recognition of what these things are. Nonetheless,


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one’s explicit knowledge of some concept could always be expressed in a proposition, as the meditator does when he answers his own question about what ‘a thing that thinks’ is by saying ‘A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions’ (CSM II 28/AT VII 28). Descartes holds that although it is always possible to define a concept, no definition can provide a clearer perception of it than conscientia can. Comparing his own views to those of Herbert of Cherbury, he writes: He examines what truth is; for my part, I have never had any doubts about truth, because it seems a notion so transcendentally clear that nobody can be ignorant of it. . . . Of course it is possible to explain the meaning of the word to someone who does not know the language, and tell him that the word ‘truth,’ in the strict sense, denotes the conformity of thought with its object, but that when it is attributed to things outside thought, it means only that they can be the objects of true thoughts, either ours or God’s. But no logical definition can be given which will help anyone to discover its nature. I think the same of many other things which are very simple and are known naturally, such as shape, size, motion, place, time, and so on: if you try to define these things you only obscure them and cause confusion. (CSMK III 139/AT II 596–7) Moreover, any definition of some concept will always involve references to other simple concepts. For example, ‘thought’ has to be spelled out in terms of ‘doubt,’ ‘understanding,’ ‘affirming,’ and so on, and, in the passage cited above, ‘truth’ is defined in terms of thought and its object. The propositional expression of one’s understanding of some simple nature will thus look very much like the propositions that Descartes says are perceived by the natural light, which, in some cases, express relationships between simple natures. So the difference between our knowledge of these truths and our knowledge of the simple natures seems simply to be that the latter is not expressed as a proposition. But, if it were, the intellect would seem to be illuminated by a great light, and the will would spontaneously assent, resulting in a positive judgment. So we can say that understanding the purely intellectual and common simple natures is also achieved by the natural light. The second feature that distinguishes truths perceived by the natural light from other innate ideas is one that the truths perceived by the natural light belong to the mind alone, which means that they are perceived by the

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pure intellect reflecting on its own process of thinking. In other words, they do not concern material substance. Passages from both Descartes’ early, unfinished Rules for the Direction of the Mind and his later Principles of Philosophy suggest a helpful way to characterize the truths perceived by the natural light. In the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes lists what he calls the ‘simple notions which are the basic components of our thoughts’ (CSM I 208/AT VIIIA 22). But Descartes also stresses that as well as these simple notions, our thoughts contain ‘eternal truths,’ such as ‘Nothing comes from nothing’ and ‘He who thinks cannot but exist while he thinks’ (CSM I 209/AT VIIIA 23–4). As we have already seen, this classification of the objects of our perceptions is prefigured in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, where Descartes distinguishes between purely intellectual simple natures, purely material simple natures, common simple natures, and common notions. Descartes says there that the common notions ‘are, as it were, links which connect other simple natures together’ (CSM I 44–5/AT X 419). In other words, they are truths about the various simple natures. What these passages from the Principles and the Rules suggest is that the truths perceived by the natural light—the common notions—are about the common and purely intellectual simple notions. And, indeed, the truths which are said in the Meditations to be perceived by the natural light are almost all about either the purely intellectual or common simple notions. For example, many of the naturally lit truths of the Third Meditation are concerned with causes (CSM II 28/AT VII 40–1; CSM II 29/AT VII 42; CSM II 30/AT VII 44); although these principles may well be applicable to physical substances, the concept of ‘cause’ can apply equally well to incorporeal substance. None of them are about the purely material simple notions or those that arise from the union of mind and body. This feature distinguishes truths perceived by the natural light from other innate ideas because there are some innate ideas which pertain to material substance. For example, Descartes thinks that the idea of extension—the nature of material substance—is innate. As I read Descartes, he thinks that the innate ideas which pertain to material substance actually require senseperception or imagination in order to be explicitly perceived. The innate idea of extension, for example, is explicitly perceived through attention to our sense-perceptions, and thus it would not be the sort of thing that is perceived by the natural light. I will say more about this in Chapter 6. I have suggested that Descartes thinks that we perceive certain things by the natural light when we pay attention to our own thoughts, either past or present. Descartes says extremely little about how perception by the natural


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light occurs, but there are some hints that he had this kind of view in mind. Consider his remarks concerning how we know that our will is free. He tells Hobbes, ‘On the question of our freedom, I made no assumptions beyond what we all experience within ourselves. Our freedom is very evident by the natural light’ (CSM II 134/AT VII 191). Again, in the Fifth Set of Replies, he tells Gassendi that propositions about the will are ‘self-evident [per se manifesta sint],’ and ‘the sorts of things that each of us ought to know by experience in his own case’ (CSM II 259/AT VII 377). In other words, to say that the will’s freedom is known by the natural light is to say that we know it through our own experience. Descartes also says that one learns the proposition ‘Everything which thinks is, or exists’ ‘from experiencing in his own case that it is impossible that he should think without existing’ (CSM II 100/AT VII 140; my emphasis). In a couple of passages, however, Descartes suggests that it is through attending to certain of the simple natures themselves that the common notions are perceived—that is, that we attend to a concept to discover some further truth about it. For example, in the Third Meditation he asserts one naturally lit truth by saying that ‘it is quite clear to anyone who attentively considers [attendenti] the nature of time that the same power and action are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment of its duration as would be required to create that thing anew’ (CSM II 33/AT VII 49; my emphasis). So it seems that he has discovered this truth by attending to the nature of time,2 rather than by experiencing anything in his own case about the difference between preservation and creation. But I do not think we are forced to conclude that the truths perceived by the natural light are either discovered through some kind of analysis of concepts, or by examining how concepts are relied on in thought. We can accommodate both kinds of remarks by treating the naturally lit truths as discovered through an analysis of concepts that occurs by way of examining one’s own mental experience. We have seen that for Descartes, acquiring knowledge of the simple natures is a two-stage process. First there is implicit knowledge, cognitio interna, experientia, conscientia, or internum testimonium, which is acquired simply through experience; we have such knowledge of some simples merely because of our nature as thinking things. Then there is reflexive knowledge, when one notices or attends to one’s previously implicit knowledge, thereby rendering it explicit. Thus, for example, the meditator has conscientia of truth because he implicitly relies on the notion of truth in the Second Meditation, as he has the thought that ‘I am, I exist is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.’ That

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thought relies on the notion of truth, and so he implicitly knows what truth is, even though he does not yet explicitly know what truth is. He makes this knowledge explicit in the Third Meditation, when he realizes that the cogito is a clear and distinct perception, and that that is sufficient to make him certain of its truth. That is, his previously implicit knowledge of what truth is has become explicit. He discovers what truth is by attending to thoughts which display the concept of truth. In a sense, this process involves attending, with the pure intellect, to the concept of truth. But what that attention involves is attention to certain thoughts, namely, those which have displayed the concept of truth. As Descartes has Eudoxus put it in The Search for Truth, ‘it would be pointless trying to define, for someone totally blind, what it is to be white: in order to know what that is, all that is needed is to have one’s eyes open and to see white’ (CSM II 418/AT X 524). We might say, then, that to know what the concept of white contains requires no more than experiencing whiteness; thus attending to one’s concept of whiteness will be a matter of attending to one’s experiences of whiteness. I believe that this is also how Descartes conceives of our discovery of innate propositional truths by means of the natural light. Those truths are (in most cases) about certain simple natures; moreover, they are discovered by attention to the simples. But this attention is not an attention that is narrowly confined to the concept of some simple, the sort of thing that would be expressed in a definition.3 Rather, attending to a concept in order to discover more of its features is a matter of attending to what we already implicitly know about that simple nature—in other words, to how that simple nature has been relied on in thought. By attending in this way, we can find certain further truths, pertaining to that simple nature, which were also relied on in our thoughts, but which, until then, we did not explicitly notice. Truths are perceived by the natural light, then, when the mind, attending to its concepts by attending to its own thoughts, discovers further truths that have been themselves relied on in the thoughts which also manifested the simple natures themselves. In sum, the truths that Descartes says are perceived by the natural light are truths that he thinks pertain to the purely intellectual and common simple natures that we rely on in our thoughts. We reflect on these simple natures by reflecting on those of our mental experiences (either past or present) which rely on them, and, in doing so, we can perceive more and more of their features, for many of these features and relationships will themselves have been displayed in our thoughts.


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5.2 Some Examples of Perception by the Natural Light To show how this model of perception by the natural light works in practice, I will consider three examples of propositions that Descartes says are perceived by the natural light: first, the cogito; second, Descartes’ notorious claim in the Third Meditation that ‘it is manifest by the natural light that there must be at least as much in the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause’ (CSM II 28/AT VII 40); third, his claim at the end of the Third Meditation that ‘all fraud and deception depend on some defect’ (CSM II 35/AT VII 52). These three claims play central roles in the Meditations’ project of establishing the existence of the immaterial soul and of a non-deceiving God. The meditator first uses the phrase ‘natural light’ in the Third Meditation. He has just been considering why he believes that the ideas that seem to be derived from things outside him resemble those things, and he has concluded that he has this belief only due to some natural impulse. He then contrasts this natural impulse with the natural light: When I say ‘Nature taught me to think this’, all I mean is that a spontaneous impulse leads me to believe it, not that its truth has been revealed to me by some natural light. There is a big difference here. Whatever is revealed to me by the natural light—for example that from the fact that I am doubting it follows that I exist, and so on—cannot in any way be open to doubt. (CSM II 26–7/AT VII 38) Notice that the meditator says that he perceives by the natural light that it follows from his doubting that he exists. In the Second Meditation, the cogito was not put quite in that way. In that passage (at CSM II 16–7/AT VII 24–5), the meditator notices that he has convinced himself, and been deceived, and thinks he is something, and from those claims he draws the conclusion that he exists. But he does not seem to explicitly notice that he is doubting. However, his awareness that he doubts is already explicit, before the Second Meditation even starts, since undertaking the doubt required an act of will in the First Meditation. Thus, just before commenting that he has convinced himself of something, been deceived, and so on, he remembers that he doubts, a fact of which he already has explicit awareness. Then, by asking himself ‘does it now follow that I too do not exist?’ (CSM II 16/AT VII 25), he turns his attention to his implicit knowledge of his existence, the internal awareness that he has of his own existence simply by virtue of

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existing as a thinking thing. The act of attending makes that knowledge explicit: he discovers the truth ‘I exist.’ And, at the same time, he sees that his knowledge of his existence is entailed by his doubting. This relationship between his doubt and his existence is what is perceived by the natural light. The claim that ‘from the fact that I doubt, it follows that I exist’ does seem to differ in certain respects from the other truths that are perceived by the natural light. I have suggested that those truths typically concern purely intellectual or common simple natures—for example, the nature of a cause, or time, or deception. They are general statements which the meditator perceives by examining some simple nature as it has been displayed in thought. But the cogito is a statement of the entailment relation between two particular propositions, ‘I doubt’ and ‘I exist,’ which are not simple natures at all. Thus it seems reasonable to wonder whether Descartes should have said, rather, that the general truth ‘Whatever thinks, exists’ is what is perceived by the natural light. I think the general principle ‘Whatever thinks, exists’ certainly could be appropriately described by Descartes as perceived by the natural light. Were the meditator to decide to attend specifically to the nature of thought, or to some form of thinking such as doubt, he would recognize that such thinking entails existence. According to the reading I am proposing, he would attend to the nature of thought by attending to some particular thought he has had or is having, and in realizing that his own thought entails his own existence, he would explicitly perceive the general truth ‘Whatever thinks, exists.’ As it stands, throughout the Meditations he implicitly knows that general truth, a point which Descartes stresses in many texts. That is, once the meditator has discovered the truth of the cogito, he then has the means to discover the general truth ‘Whatever thinks, exists’ because he perceives a particular instance of this relationship in the cogito. It is just that the meditator does not examine the nature of thought sufficiently intensively to make that general truth explicit. But just because ‘Whatever thinks, exists’ could be known by the natural light does not mean that ‘I think, therefore I exist’ cannot also be so perceived. In other words, what the meditator can know by the natural light is not restricted to propositions about general things; he can also perceive propositions about particulars by the natural light, if those particulars are also things that pertain to the pure intellect. Although the meditator has relied upon the natural light in the Second Meditation, he does not actually mention the natural light until the Third Meditation. This suggests that the Third Meditation statement ‘Whatever is


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revealed to me by the natural light . . . cannot be in any way open to doubt’ (CSM II 27/AT VII 38) is itself an act of making explicit a previously implicit awareness of what the natural light is. In other words, the meditator discovers that he has a power of ‘natural light’ by way of using that power to have the thought ‘I think, therefore I exist,’ and later reflecting on how he discovered that truth. The rest of the Third Meditation and the Fourth Meditation provide further investigation into how this power works, through exercising it. The meditator’s realization that it is only because of a natural impulse that he believes that certain ideas resemble things in the external world (if there is such a world) thus serves to draw his attention to the fact that he has a power of natural light. This realization also plays two more roles in the discovery of truths by the natural light. First, as we saw in the discussion of the idea of God in Chapter 3, in drawing the conclusion that he has no good reason to think that certain ideas really do resemble anything in the external world, the meditator realizes an important way in which he as a thinker is limited.4 Thus it is no coincidence that the very next thought the meditator has concerns his idea of an unlimited being, an idea ‘of a supreme God, eternal, infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, and the creator of all things that exist apart from him’ (CSM II 28/AT VII 40). For, as Descartes writes in the Third Meditation: my perception of the infinite, that is God, is in some way prior to my perception of the finite, that is myself. For how could I understand that I doubted or desired—that is, lacked something—and that I was not wholly perfect, unless there were in me some idea of a more perfect being which enabled me to recognize my own defects by comparison? (CSM II 31/AT VII 45–6) As I argued in Chapter 3, Descartes holds that one may explicitly perceive the idea of oneself before explicitly perceiving the idea of God, but nonetheless the implicit awareness of God precedes both. The idea of the infinite is explicitly perceived when one pays attention to the fact that one is limited, for realizing that limitation is only possible relative to something unlimited. So, in recognizing that he has spontaneous natural impulses which sometimes push him in the wrong direction, the meditator realizes that his nature is limited. And this realization not only helps him to make explicit his awareness of God; it also serves as an instance of the meditator being deceived—by the senses—due to a defect in his nature. That is, the senses

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cause us to have ideas which make us think that certain qualities really are in external objects. The sense-perception of the wax, for example, presents its various secondary qualities as if they were actually located in the wax. So if we believe sense-perception, we will be wrong about this. The second role played by the meditator’s recognition that it is only natural impulse which makes him think his ideas resemble external things is thus to provide him with an example of deception being due to a defect or limitation. The meditator does not attend to this feature of the situation right now, but it will be important later on. The next example of a truth perceived by the natural light in the Third Meditation is Descartes’ claim about reality, causes, and effects. He says first that ‘it is manifest by the natural light that there must be at least as much in the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause’ (CSM II 28/AT VII 40). The meditator provides some further exposition of this claim, pointing out that there is no other source for the reality of an effect than its cause, and that for the cause to convey that reality to the effect, it must, of course, possess that reality. He then says: It follows from this both that something cannot arise from nothing, and also that what is more perfect—that is, contains in itself more reality— cannot arise from what is less perfect. And this is transparently true [perspicue verum] not only in the case of effects which possess <what the philosophers call> actual or formal reality, but also in the case of ideas, where one is considering only <what they call> objective reality. (CSM II 28/AT VII 40–1) A little later, he asserts that ‘it is clear [perspicuum] to me, by the natural light, that the ideas in me are like images which can easily fall short of the perfection of the things from which they are taken, but which cannot contain anything greater or more perfect’ (CSM II 29/AT VII 42). Notice that this truth is essentially the same as the claim said to be ‘transparently true’ in the passage quoted above; both concern the degree of perfection that can be found in ideas. That these are both statements of the same truth is further suggested by the similarity of language used in the cases: the first passage quoted above says that the truth is perspicue verum, and the second passage also uses the word perspicuum. Descartes uses this word and its variants much less frequently than the word clarus, and seems to reserve it for characterizing truths perceived by the natural light. Thus Descartes apparently holds that we perceive by the natural light both that ‘there must be at least as much in the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause’ and that this is true of the causes of ideas.


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Indeed, I think we should read Descartes as holding that ‘Something cannot arise from nothing,’ and that ‘what is more perfect—that is, contains in itself more reality—cannot arise from what is less perfect’ are also perceived by the natural light; they are said to follow from the naturally lit truth about the reality of causes and effects, and they are very similar to propositions set out as ‘Axioms or Common Notions’ in the Second Set of Replies, which I argued in Chapter 4 should be understood as truths revealed by the natural light. These claims all concern causation; they are essentially claims about the connection between the reality of an effect and the reality of its cause. And the meditator makes these claims in the context of an examination of his ideas qua effects. Considering ideas as simply ‘modes of thought,’ he says, all ideas ‘appear to come from within me in the same fashion’ (CSM II 27– 8/AT VII 40). An idea as a mode of thought is, I take it, an operation of thought. All operations of thought are performed by the meditator in the same way, and thus have the same amount of formal reality. But, the meditator says, if we consider ideas in terms of their objective reality, they differ considerably, and these differences derive from differences among the causes of the ideas. Thus to consider the objective reality of an idea is to consider an idea as an effect. I would suggest that in this portion of the Third Meditation, the meditator is attending to what he already implicitly knows about effects. And any principle he has already relied on in his thinking is something that he implicitly knows, even if he didn’t explicitly attend to that principle at the time. This is what Descartes means when he tells Burman that a general principle like ‘Whatever thinks, exists’ can be ‘implicitly . . . presupposed and prior,’ even if we are not ‘expressly and explicitly aware of its priority.’ We fail to be aware of this principle because we don’t pay attention to it in the same way that we pay attention to ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’ (CSMK III 333/AT V 147). The meditator is implicitly aware of the principle that an effect requires a cause with at least as much reality as that effect, because he has in fact relied on just such a principle in his own thinking. So we need to find a place in the meditator’s past thinking where he has implicitly relied on the principle that an effect requires a cause with at least as much reality as that effect. Such a passage occurs in the First Meditation. There, the meditator says that although atheists may reject his argument that there is some omnipotent God causing him to be deceived, nonetheless, ‘since deception and error seem to be imperfections, the less powerful they make my original cause, the more likely it is that I am so imperfect as to be deceived all the time’ (CSM II 14/AT VII 21). The claim here is that

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the degree of perfection of the meditator as an effect depends on the degree of perfection of the meditator’s cause. If one were to set out the meditator’s argument as a syllogism, one would need to specify that an effect can have no greater reality than the reality of its cause, for that principle acts as a suppressed premise in the meditator’s thinking. Relying on the causal principle, the meditator establishes that God exists. In Chapter 3, I discussed Jean-Marie Beyssade’s claim that ‘the task remains of making precise the innate idea of God, which is the idea of a unity that is beyond our comprehension,’5 and I suggested that this ‘making precise’ is a matter of making the idea more distinct—that is, of determining what the innate idea of God contains and does not contain. The ontological argument in the Fifth Meditation is indeed, as Beyssade points out, a way of enumerating what is contained in the idea of God. I would add that the meditator’s claim that God cannot be a deceiver, a claim which occurs near the end of the Third Meditation, is another way of making the meditator’s perception of God’s nature more distinct. For in realizing that God cannot be a deceiver, the meditator realizes that the feature of deception is one that cannot be included in God’s nature. Thus he marks off this idea from other ideas, such as the meditator’s idea of the evil genius. The claim that God cannot be a deceiver depends on another truth that is perceived by the natural light, that ‘all fraud and deception depend on some defect’ (CSM II 35/AT VII 52). But how does the meditator know that this is so? Again, according to the model I have suggested, the meditator must discover this truth by reflecting on the nature of fraud and deception, through reflecting on any thoughts that relied on those notions. What we should look for, then, are instances in which the meditator perpetrated some kind of fraud or deception on himself. And, indeed, there is an instance of this. As I pointed out earlier, when he concludes that he has tended to think that his sense-perceptions resemble things existing outside him only because of some ‘blind impulse,’ he thereby perceives that deception depends on a defect or limitation in his own nature. Thus in looking back and focusing attention on the relationship between deception and defect that he has already experienced, the meditator realizes the general truth that deception depends on such defects. Just as Descartes has said in the Second Set of Replies, ‘it is the nature of our mind to construct general propositions on the basis of our knowledge of particular ones’ (CSM II 100/AT VII 140–1). One way to think about the sense in which some thoughts ‘rely on’ other thoughts is to consider the distinction Descartes makes between the analytic and synthetic methods of demonstration. The analytic method, he


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says, ‘shows the true way by means of which the thing in question was discovered methodically and as it were a priori, so that if the reader is willing to follow it and give sufficient attention to all points, he will make the thing his own and understand it just as perfectly as if he had discovered it for himself’ (CSM II 110/AT VII 155–6). However, he continues, ‘there are many truths which—although it is vital to be aware of them—this method often scarcely mentions, since they are transparently clear to anyone who gives them his attention’ (CSM II 110/AT VII 156). The synthetic method of demonstration, on the other hand, ‘demonstrates the conclusion clearly and employs a long series of definitions, postulates, axioms, theorems and problems, so that if anyone denies one of the conclusions it can be shown at once that it is contained in what has gone before’ (CSM II 111/AT VII 156). So the principles that a thought relies on are the principles that a synthetic demonstration would need to list as premises in order to show how that thought can be established. Descartes stresses that the Meditations is in the analytic style (CSM II 111/AT VII 156); thus, as we would expect, the principles that the meditator relies on are not spelled out at the beginning of the project or even at the time when he relies on them. Rather, they are discovered, and perceived to be ‘transparently clear,’ when the meditator attends in the right way to his past or present thoughts.

5.3 Conclusion I have argued that by ‘perception by the natural light,’ Descartes has in mind a process that begins with willing that one direct the attention of the intellect towards one’s own process of pure thinking—that is, towards thoughts that do not depend in any way on the body. When one attends properly to these thoughts, one can perceive the principles that those thoughts rely on; in fact, one can perceive them so clearly and distinctly that the will cannot help but assent to their truth. The attention that Descartes has in mind here is not simply attending to the simple natures themselves, but attending to how they have been relied on in thought. Our reliance, in thought, on some nature displays further features which are available to be perceived, assuming we attend to our mental experience. So, we must focus our attention on some already-explicit idea or propositional thought which we wish to perceive more clearly and distinctly. Again, focusing on the idea means focusing on our mental experience of it; by attending in this way, we can perceive relationships between that idea and other ideas that we have relied on in our thinking (which we may or may

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not have yet explicitly perceived). The propositions expressing these features are those that seem to fill the mind with light, and thus are judged to be true. In the next chapter, I consider those natures which Descartes calls ‘purely material.’ In the Rules, Descartes says that this category includes the natures of shape, extension, and motion, which ‘are recognized to be present only in bodies’ (CSM I 44/AT X 419). The explicit perception of the purely material innate ideas, I shall argue, requires some corporeal image on which to reflect; actualizing our disposition to perceive these innate ideas thus differs in some ways from the way that that disposition is exercised on purely intellectual or common innate ideas.

Chapter 6

Innate Ideas, Corporeal Substance, and Mathematics

According to the account developed so far, an innate idea in the objective sense (an innate ideao) is a ‘true, immutable, and eternal essence’ (CSMK III 183/AT III 383) existing, possibly unperceived, in the human mind. This presence in the mind is what Descartes means when he refers to a thing’s ‘objective’ existence, and it is the objective presence of the nature that gives a thinker a disposition to perceive it—what I have been calling an innate idead. When the thinker does in fact attend to this objectively present nature, he or she thereby comes to have an innate idea in the material sense (innate ideam). For Descartes, the process of coming to have innate ideasm involves attending to those of our thoughts which implicitly rely on concepts of the objectively present essences. Developing Robert McRae’s suggestion that certain Cartesian innate ideas are ‘implicit’ in thought and rendered explicit through reflection, I have shown how the Meditations displays the process by which various innate ideas come to be explicitly perceived through reflection. So far, I have been focusing on innate ideas which Descartes thinks can be perceived by the pure intellect as it reflects on itself. But although innate ideas are all perceived only by the pure intellect, this does not mean that the pure intellect cannot draw on other faculties of thought in its acts of perception. The pure intellect can also attend to and reflect on thoughts that come to it through sense-perception and imagination. Thus some ideas, though innate, and though perceived by the pure intellect, nonetheless require the use of the body in order to be so perceived. One of these is the idea of extension; others are ideas of particular shapes. These correspond to what Descartes calls the ‘purely material simples’ in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, and will be addressed in Sections 1 through 3 of this chapter. In Section 4 I examine Descartes’ views on the innateness of geometrical propositions. In Section 5 I offer some speculative comments on two sorts of mathematical propositions about which Descartes has very little to say: arithmetical propositions, and

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Euclidean common notions. Section 6 discusses Descartes’ laws of motion and whether or not Descartes considered them to be innate.

6.1 The Innate Idea of Extension I think it is clear that Descartes thought the idea of extension was in fact innate. However, this view is not shared by all commentators. In particular, Robert McRae has argued that while Descartes took our ‘ideas of the infinity of possible figures in extension’ to be innate, he took the idea of extension itself to be adventitious.1 In the Sixth Meditation, McRae claims, the meditator says that the idea of extension is produced in us by bodies, and hence is not innate.2 But I think McRae has misinterpreted this passage; in the Sixth Meditation, the meditator is concerned with how he gets ideas of particular bodies, not with how he gets the idea of extension in general. He is seeking to establish, not the cause of his idea of extension, but the cause of his ideas of particular extended things. McRae also invokes the Fifth Set of Replies, where Descartes says to Gassendi: I did not assert that the ideas of material things are derived from the mind, as you somewhat disingenuously make out. Later on I explicitly showed that these ideas often come to us from bodies, and that it is this that enables us to prove the existence of bodies. (CSM II 253/AT VII 367) McRae maintains that ‘this is a denial that the idea of extension is innate.’3 But, again, Descartes uses the plural here, to refer to ‘bodies.’4 Descartes can quite reasonably maintain that while our ideas of particular objects are adventitious, the idea of extension, of body in general, is innate. And, in fact, in a letter to Mersenne, Descartes lists our idea of ‘body [corporis]’ among our innate ideas (CSMK III 183/AT III 383); and since by ‘body’ he means extended substance, this is as good as to say that the idea of extension is innate. McRae actually concedes that both a 1643 letter to Elizabeth and Principles II 3 provide evidence that the idea of extension is innate.5 In the letter to Elizabeth, Descartes writes that there are ‘certain primitive notions,’ among them the notion of extension, which we can find ‘in our own soul,’ since it ‘possesses them all by nature’ (CSMK III 218–9/AT III 666). Principles II 3 suggests that we can learn ‘what external bodies are like in themselves’ if we ‘make use of the intellect alone, carefully attending to the ideas implanted in it by nature’ (CSM I 224/AT VIIIA 41–2); in other words, we learn that the nature of external bodies is to be extended because we have


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within us an innate idea of extension. But, curiously, McRae offers no explanation for these texts, which seem clearly to contradict his interpretation that the Cartesian idea of extension is not innate. While McRae thinks that the Cartesian idea of extension is adventitious, he nonetheless reads Descartes as holding that our ideas of shapes are innate. I have argued against the first thesis. In fact, I agree with McRae about the second thesis. However, given McRae’s endorsement of the first thesis, he cannot reasonably attribute to Descartes the second thesis. As Descartes makes quite clear in the Principles, the possible figures that extension can take are among the modes of extension.6 Descartes may well admit that the ordinary pre-philosophical person can think of shapes without having an explicit idea of extension; such a person might not realize that shapes are modes of extension, and indeed might never have considered what substance and modes are. But in such a case, it seems that the person’s ideas of shapes would not be clear and distinct. To really understand shapes—to perceive them clearly and distinctly—we must realize that they are modes of extension, for Descartes says that ‘we shall arrive at the best perception of all these items if we regard them simply as modes of the things in which they are located’ (CSM I 216/AT VIIIA 32). But surely to regard a shape as a mode of extension requires that we have a clear and distinct idea of extension. Thus a proper understanding of the various figures that extension can take requires that we have the idea of extension. Now suppose, as McRae claims, that Descartes thinks our ideas of the various figures are innate. As McRae understands it, this means that we ought to be able to have clear and distinct ideas of the shapes without having had any sensory perception at all.7 But if the idea of extension is adventitious, as McRae also claims, then this means that the idea of extension cannot play a role in our clear and distinct understanding of the shapes. But we have just seen that the idea of extension must play a role in the clear and distinct perception of shapes. Thus, if our ideas of the particular shapes are innate, the idea of extension must also be innate.

6.2 Discovering the Innate Idea of Extension Commentators on Descartes have typically claimed that all Cartesian innate ideas are known entirely by the pure intellect, with no use at all of either sensation or imagination. So, for example, Lesley Beck writes: By innate ideas, then, we are to understand ideas the apprehension and development of which express the natural capacity of our mind. Their

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formation requires no stimulus from sense and no assistance from the imagination and is in no way conditioned by being dependent on the body. The mind is of such a nature that it can, simply by becoming pura and attenta, apprehend, for instance, the idea of a triangle . . . and develop therefrom by simple inspection, i.e. by intuitus and deductio, a body of mathematical truth.8 If this is right, then the innate idea of extension, too, should be discoverable without any use of sensation or imagination. John Carriero has argued for such a view, citing the Fifth Meditation in his claim that ‘we would still know that the essence of body is extension even if there existed no bodies from which such knowledge might be imported.’9 Descartes does indeed emphasize in the Second Meditation that the nature of extension is known only by the pure intellect (CSM II 22/AT VII 34). That is, understanding what extension is requires stripping away, in thought, the imaginable and sensible features of a thing. Nonetheless, I want to argue that sensory experience is necessary for the meditator to explicitly perceive that idea; the idea (in the objective sense) of extension can only be made explicit by reflection on mental images that we possess through sense-perception. That is, to perceive this idea requires the use of sensation. On this view, the pure intellect cannot perceive the idea of extension by reflecting on itself, but must turn to and attend to sense-perceptions. Recall Descartes’ claim, in a letter to Mersenne, that ‘the soul acquires all its knowledge by the reflection which it makes either on itself (in the case of intellectual matters) or (in the case of corporeal matters) on the various dispositions of the brain to which it is joined, which may result from the action of the senses or from other causes’ (CSMK III 140/ATII 598).10 The idea of extension is mentioned in the First Meditation as one of those ‘simpler and more universal things’ which survive the dreaming argument but are then called into question by the possibility of a deceiving God or less-powerful creator (CSM II 14/AT VII 20). After the fresh start of the Second Meditation, though, it takes reflection on the wax, which the meditator perceives through the senses, to rediscover the idea of extension.11 The meditator reports on how the wax tastes, smells, looks, feels, and sounds when rapped with the knuckles; he then puts the wax by the fire and reports again on the wax’s taste, smell, color, shape, size, temperature, and lack of sound. Having discovered that the nature of the wax does not consist in these qualities, which are changeable, the meditator says: ‘Let us concentrate, take away everything which does not belong to the wax, and see what is left: merely something extended, flexible and changeable’ (CSM II 20/


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AT VII 30–1). The word here translated as ‘let us concentrate’ is attendamus. It is through attending to his sense-perceptions of the wax, through removing everything changeable about those perceptions, that the meditator discovers the nature of the wax. He perceives the nature of the wax ‘by the mind alone,’ for, he says, the perception I have of it is a case not of vision or touch or imagination—nor has it ever been, despite previous appearances—but of purely mental scrutiny; and this can be imperfect and confused, as it was before, or clear and distinct as it is now, depending on how carefully I concentrate [attendo] on what the wax consists in. (CSM II 21/AT VII 31) In making explicit the nature of the wax, the meditator can begin to clearly and distinctly perceive that nature. And although his perception of the wax’s nature is achieved by the pure intellect, sense-perceptions nonetheless provide the ‘data’ to which the intellect can attend. Of course, at this point in the Meditations, the meditator has not yet established that bodies such as the piece of wax actually exist. Nonetheless, all that is necessary for his mental scrutiny is that he seem to perceive the piece of wax.12 Descartes seems to think that the meditator represents a typical educated but non-philosophical person of his day. Thus what is effective for the meditator would be effective for any other person coming at philosophy with a similar background. But one might argue that this does not mean that sensory experience is necessary in order to explicitly perceive the idea of extension. However, there are both textual and philosophical reasons in support of such a reading. First, in Principles II 1 Descartes says that ‘we have sensory awareness of, or rather as a result of sensory stimulation [à sensu impulsi] we have a clear and distinct perception of, some kind of matter, which is extended in length, breadth and depth, and has various differently shaped and variously moving parts’ (CSM I 223/AT VIIIA 40). This seems to indicate that Descartes’ view is that all thinkers get the idea of extension in this way. In the Rules, too, Descartes sets up a contrast between the purely intellectual simple natures ‘which the intellect recognizes by means of a sort of innate light, without the aid of any corporeal image,’ and the purely material simple natures, ‘which are recognized to be present only in bodies—such as shape, extension and motion, etc.’ (CSM I 44–5/AT X 419). The fact that Descartes distinguishes the latter natures from those which are known without corporeal images suggests that they are known by means of such images. Second, it is hard to see how the idea of extension could be acquired through reflection merely on those thoughts which we have through the

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pure intellect alone. Examples of such thoughts would be thinking about one’s own incorporeal nature, or about God; but how could one come to explicitly perceive the nature of corporeal substance through reflecting on these ideas, since they are ideas of incorporeal substances? One can certainly imagine a different sort of being in whom all innate ideas are actually perceived from the very moment that the being begins to think (and, in fact, Descartes might say that angels are beings like this13). For that sort of being, the idea of extension would be perceived without any reflection on sense-perceptions, but only because no reflection at all would be required for such a being to perceive any of its innate ideas, since the ideas are already actual from the very beginning. For humans, however, in whom innate ideas are (to use Cottingham’s term) ‘submerged’ until reflection brings them to light, it is difficult to see how reflection on the activity of pure thinking—for example, on the activity of doubting or on thoughts like ‘I exist as a thinking thing’—could bring the idea of extension to light, since those thoughts do not rely on the idea of extended substance. Thus I think Descartes is entitled to the claim that sensory perception is a necessary condition for the explicit perception of the innate idea of extension. I said earlier that attention to sense-perceptions can reveal the idea of extension because those perceptions rely on the idea of extension. But what does ‘reliance’ come to in such cases? In Chapter 3, I argued that for a thought to rely on some idea means, for Descartes, that a complete synthetic account of how that thought can be established to be true would invoke that idea. Likewise, to understand how a thought can rely on the idea of extension, we should consider the role that the idea of extension would play in a synthetic account of the thought which depends on it. By ‘synthetic account,’ I mean the sort of explanation that Descartes provides of concepts like ‘thought,’ ‘clarity and distinctness,’ ‘judgement,’ ‘substance,’ and so on in the Principles, which he characterizes as a work in the synthetic method. One way to understand his goal in these explanations is to take him to be spelling out what a clear and distinct perception of each of these things would be. So, while an analytic account would display the gradual process by which a thinker comes to see what (for example) ‘judgement’ is, a synthetic account of the concept of ‘judgement’ would assume that one has already made the discovery, and simply list the elements that make up a ‘judgement.’ That is, it would list the features which pertain to the concept ‘judgement,’ which are the very things we would perceive if we were to clearly and distinctly perceive the nature of judgement. So, to say that some idea X relies on the idea of extension is to say that an account of what actually pertains to idea X in the objective sense (i.e., the


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nature of which idea X is an idea) will include the nature ‘extension.’ That is, a clear and distinct perception of idea X will include understanding the nature ‘extension.’ I will argue in the next section, for example, that a synthetic account of a shape (even shapes we have not perceived) will invoke the idea of extension, since shapes are modes of extension. That some of our ideas rely on the nature of extension is, Descartes might say, a fact about the order of nature; a synthetic account describes this order, rather than the order of discovery. Thus there is a way in which the nature ‘extension’ is more fundamental, or simpler, than the ideas which rely on it. But Descartes emphasizes that the order of discovery almost never follows the order of nature, so the perception of the innate idea of extension will naturally come after the perception of the ideas which rely on it. Thus we would in fact expect Descartes to hold that some examination of the ideas which rely on the idea of extension is necessary in order to discover that we do indeed possess an innate idea of extension. On my reading of Descartes, the body plays rather a paradoxical role. Since we need to have sense-perceptions on which we can reflect in order to acquire the idea of extension, the body is necessary for us to come to know those ideas. Yet Descartes thinks that the ideas we receive through the senses, as well as our natural concern to provide for the body’s needs, work to prevent us from focusing attention on our innate ideas. It seems strange to suggest that we need to attend to and reflect on our sense-perceptions, when I have already argued that, for Descartes, it is precisely our attention to those ideas which prevents us from having explicit innate ideas from the moment of birth. But a passage from the Principles suggests a way to respond to this worry. Descartes indicates that we can attend to our sense-perceptions—or to mental images created by the imagination’s ability to join remembered sense-perceptions14—in more than one way. When we see two stones, he says, we can direct our attention either ‘to their nature’ or ‘merely to the fact that there are two of them’ (CSM I 212/AT VIIIA 27). That is, we can attend to them qua stones, or qua two stones. Attending to a sensory perception as a means to perceive the idea of extension is thus an appropriate reason for such attention; the attention occurs because one has willed it, rather than because one is so in the grip of sensation that one cannot tear one’s attention away. But can’t one only will to direct one’s attention toward the idea of extension if one already has that idea? That is, how does a thinker know how to direct her attention if she doesn’t already know where to look? We saw this worry earlier, in Chapter 3, where I agreed that a thinker cannot know quite where she should turn her mental vision when she begins meditating.

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One cannot know in advance which thoughts will be the most fruitful for one’s investigations. Nonetheless, Descartes’ method of doubt does restrict the candidates for such reflection. Although Descartes thinks that being in the grip of sense-perceptions can be an impediment to perceiving our implicit innate ideas, this does not mean that it would be more desirable to have no sensations. Descartes emphasizes the importance of the body and its passions in one of his letters to Princess Elizabeth (CSMK III 265/AT IV 287). And, according to the reading I have offered, without external sensation, we would never come to perceive the innate idea of extension and other mathematical ideas which, we will see in the next section, depend on our having that idea. Presumably Descartes would suggest that so long as sensory perceptions play an auxiliary role in our mental life, helping us to come to have certain ideas, they do not pose a problem. The problem arises when we focus our attention on the sensory perceptions qua sensory perceptions and do not carefully attend to them with the pure intellect. This is precisely the function of the piece of wax in the Second Meditation; smelling it, touching it, seeing it, and otherwise perceiving it with the senses allow the meditator to make explicit his innate idea of body as extension, which then becomes the focus of attention.

6.3 Perceiving Ideas of Shapes Descartes did not hold only that the general idea of extension was innate. He also described ideas of particular geometrical shapes as innate. For example, in a 1641 letter to Mersenne he says that ideas of triangles are innate (CSMK III 183/AT III 383), and in the Fifth Meditation he suggests that various other ideas of shapes are innate (CSM II 45/AT VII 64–5). Descartes addresses the question of how we explicitly perceive our innate ideas of geometrical shapes in just a few texts, and on the face of it, they present claims that seem difficult to reconcile. In some texts he stresses that we can have ideas of shapes which we have never perceived through the senses, and that whatever shapes we do happen to perceive through the senses do not give us our ideas of those shapes. But in a couple of texts he seems to suggest that sense-perceptions can nonetheless play some role in our perception of our innate ideas of shapes. In this section I will examine these various texts in order to develop a consistent account on Descartes’ behalf.


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In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes states quite emphatically that there are innate ideas of shapes which we can perceive even without having had sensory experience of them. He writes: It would be beside the point for me to say that since I have from time to time seen bodies of triangular shape, the idea of the triangle may have come to me from external things by means of the sense organs. For I can think up [excogitare] countless other shapes which there can be no suspicion of my ever having encountered through the senses, and yet I can demonstrate various properties of these shapes, just as I can with the triangle. (CSM II 45/AT VII 64–5) This passage seems to suggest that at least certain mathematical ideas can be perceived entirely without the use of the senses. Likewise, a passage from the Fifth Replies to the Meditations stresses that perceptions of actual triangles in the world do not give us our idea of the triangle. Descartes says that when, as children, we see triangles drawn on a piece of paper, it cannot have been this figure that showed us how we should conceive of the true triangle studied by geometers, since the true triangle is contained in the figure only in the way in which a statue of Mercury is contained in a rough block of wood. But since the idea of the true triangle was already in us, and could be conceived by our mind more easily than the more composite figure of the triangle drawn on paper, when we saw the composite figure we did not apprehend the figure we saw, but rather the true triangle. It is just the same as when we look at a piece of paper on which some lines have been drawn in ink to represent a man’s face: the idea that this produces in us is not so much the idea of these lines as the idea of a man. Yet this would certainly not happen unless the human face were already known to us from some other source, and we were more accustomed to think of the face than the lines drawn in ink; . . . Thus we could not recognize the geometrical triangle from the diagram on the paper unless our mind already possessed the idea of it from some other source. (CSM II 262/AT VII 382) Our ability to have an idea of the ‘true’ triangle when we have only perceived drawn triangles with our senses means, Descartes says, that we must already possess the idea of the true triangle. Otherwise, there is no explanation for how, upon seeing the drawn triangle, we think of the true triangle.15

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Descartes’ analogy in this passage can seem puzzling. At first glance, it seems that he is explicating the way in which a true triangle is ‘contained in’ a drawn triangle. But if that is his point, it does not seem well served by this analogy. First, couldn’t we say that an infinite variety of statues is contained in any given piece of wood? But we surely do not want to say that an infinite variety of shapes is ‘contained’ in a triangle. Second, the sense of containment in the two cases does not really seem to be the same; it seems much less appropriate to say that the true triangle is ‘implicitly in’ the three lines than to say that the statue is ‘implicitly in’ the wood.16 Third, whatever process Descartes has in mind by which an idea of a true triangle can be drawn out, as it were, from the perception of three lines on a piece of paper, it is surely not like carving. So, despite Descartes’ suggestion that the analogy explains the sense of ‘containment’ that he has in mind, here, I don’t think that can be his point. Frederick P. Van De Pitte has pointed out that ‘the figure of Mercury is only there if the skill of an artist is brought to bear on the wood to make it appear.’17 But, in fact, it is not just that the artist must have a certain skill; she must also already have an idea or plan of the statue in mind, which will govern the way she carves the wood. And just as a statue can be elicited from a piece of wood only if one already has an idea of the statue in mind, so Descartes thinks that the idea of a perfect triangle can only be elicited from a perception of an imperfect triangle if one already possesses (in some sense) the idea of a triangle.18 He is making the same point with this analogy that he makes in his rhetorical question in the Fifth Set of Replies, where he wonders, ‘how could we have a faculty for amplifying all created perfections (i.e. conceiving of something greater or more ample than they are) were it not for the fact that there is in us an idea of something greater, namely God?’ (CSM II 252/AT VII 365). In both cases, the faculty we have to perceive the innate idea—that is, our faculty to ‘form’ the idea of God or of a perfect triangle—is structured by the actual objective presence of God or the perfect triangle. It is the presence of the idea in the objective sense which allows us to say that we have a disposition or faculty to perceive the thing. In both the Fifth Meditation and the Fifth Set of Replies, Descartes gives the impression that the senses play no role in our acquisition of ideas of shape, either those we have never seen instantiated in the external world or those we have. Yet this impression is misleading. In fact, I will argue, Descartes thinks that our ability to have ideas (in the material sense) of shapes which we have never perceived through the senses depends on our having the idea (in the material sense) of extension; once we have


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perceived the innate idea of extension, we can ‘think up [excogitare]’ various ideas of shapes and numbers, including those which we have never perceived through the senses. (This is not, of course, to say that one needs to explicitly know the innate idea of extension in order to have sensoryperceptions of shapes; it is simply to say that people cannot use the intellect to formulate ideas of new shapes without having perceived the innate idea of extension.) As I argued in the previous section, perceiving the innate idea of extended body requires having had some sensory experience. Thus, I read Descartes as holding that while we can ‘think up’ ideas of various shapes without having had sensory experiences of them, having had some sensory-perception is nonetheless a necessary condition for actually doing so. The order of the Meditations supports such an interpretation. The meditator learns in the Second Meditation that the nature of body is to be extended and changeable, through generalizing from the fact that this is true of a particular piece of wax. That is, as a result of considering the piece of wax, the meditator learns that its essence is to be extended, flexible, and changeable,19 and that he knows this essence through his intellect alone (CSM II 20/AT VII 31). The conclusion that the intellect knows the nature of this particular piece of wax is then said to be true of ‘wax in general’ (CSM II 21/AT VII 31), and by the end of the Second Meditation it has been generalized (without comment) to apply to ‘bodies’ (CSM II 22/AT VII 34). When the meditator next mentions the natures of mind and body (in the Sixth Meditation), he says that body is ‘an extended, non-thinking thing’ (CSM II 54/AT VII 78), clearly assuming that he has already established, earlier in the Meditations, that this is indeed the nature of body. Thus I think we can safely read the Second Meditation as concluding with the realization that extension and changeability constitute the nature of body. The meditator then discovers in the Third Meditation that ‘shape is a function of the boundaries of this extension’ (CSM II 30/AT VII 43). In other words, shape is a mode of extension.20 But Descartes holds that modes of a substance cannot be understood apart from that substance. By this he apparently means that to have a clear and distinct idea of a mode (such as shape), we must also have a clear and distinct idea of the substance in which the mode inheres. This seems plausible, for in order to understand the meaning of, say, ‘shape,’ one must grasp, among other things, that only extended things can take shapes. Thus, to have a clear and distinct idea of a shape such as triangularity requires that one already have a clear and distinct idea of extension. And I would suggest that when Descartes speaks of ‘thinking up’ new shapes, he does not mean that we think of that shape

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in a confused and obscure way, but that we are able to think of it clearly and distinctly. To ‘think up’ a new shape means one can form a clear and distinct perception of that shape, and to do this requires that we know it is a mode of extension; thus, ‘thinking up’ new shapes requires that one already have perceived the idea of extension. Again, the Meditations follows just this order of discovery. In the Second Meditation, as we have seen, the meditator first perceives that he has an idea of extension in general and some ideas of extended objects in particular. At the beginning of the Fifth Meditation he lists the ideas of material things that he already has, in order to ‘see which of them are distinct and which confused’ (CSM II 44/AT VII 63), and he finds that his idea of the extension of continuous quantity is distinct, as are his ideas of the sizes, shapes, positions, motions, and durations that he attributes to extension. It is after listing these distinct ideas that the meditator says he also has ideas of things with ‘their own true and immutable natures,’ such as the idea of a triangle, and that he can ‘think up countless other shapes which there can be no suspicion of my ever having encountered through the senses’ (CSM II 44–5/AT VII 64). That is, the meditator’s recognition that he has an idea of extension occurs before his recognition that he can think up other shapes besides triangles. The meditator does not think about chiliagons, for example, until the Sixth Meditation; until he has reflected on his senseperceptions and thereby perceived the idea of extension, he is apparently not able to think clearly and distinctly of shapes which he has not actually perceived through the senses. Having the (explicit) idea of extension, then, seems to be necessary in order to think up shapes of which one has not had sensory experience.21 I have argued that to have innate ideas in the objective sense implies, for Descartes, that we have correlative abilities to perceive those ideas. But it seems now that exercising our ability to perceive the innate ideas of certain shapes depends not just on our possession of the innate ideas in the objective sense of those shapes, but on our actually having perceived the innate idea of extension. Someone might raise the following objection: if we cannot really exercise our ability to perceive our innate ideas of certain shapes until we have already perceived the idea of extension, can we really be said, from the start, to have such an ability? But this poses no more of a problem for Descartes than does his claim that exercising our capacities to perceive our innate ideas (in the objective sense) requires some meditative practice. In both cases, certain conditions have to be satisfied in order to exercise the capacity; but this need not mean that we do not have the capacity. It is no different from saying, for example,


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that a baby has a capacity to walk by virtue of having legs, even if exercising that capacity requires practice.22 Another question which might arise is whether a perception of the idea of extension is not only necessary but also sufficient for being able to think up multiple new shapes. It seems so, given the close connection for Descartes between extension and changeability. This connection is suggested, but not elaborated, in the Second Meditation, where the meditator realizes that being ‘extended, flexible and changeable’ is the true nature of the wax (CSM II 20/AT VII 31). Reflecting further upon what ‘extended’ means, he says, ‘I would not be making a correct judgement about the nature of wax unless I believed it capable of being extended in many more different ways than I will ever encompass in my imagination’ (CSM II 21/ AT VII 31). In other words, the idea of extension includes within it the idea of changing shape, of taking on different forms of extension. This conclusion is borne out by other Cartesian texts. In the Sixth Set of Replies, for example, Descartes cashes out extension in terms of changeability in length, breadth, and depth: ‘nothing whatever belongs to the concept of body except the fact that it is something which has length, breadth and depth and is capable of various shapes and motions’ (CSM II 297/AT VII 440). Likewise, he states in a 1648 letter that ‘extension is a nature which takes on all shapes’ (CSMK III 357/AT V 221). Thus, truly to understand the nature of body in general is to understand not just that body is ‘extended, flexible and changeable,’ but to understand that it is possible for that thing to take on ‘countless changes,’ more changes than one can imagine (CSM II 210– 1/AT VII 31), and therefore, more changes than one has ever perceived through the senses. And to understand that is to understand that one can think up more shapes than one has seen, and so, presumably, to be able to think up those shapes.23 This does not mean, of course, that having the explicit idea of extension is sufficient for having explicit ideas of all other shapes; it is simply sufficient for having the ability to have those ideas. Actually to ‘think up’ the ideas, or ‘produce [them] from my thought’ (CSM II 45/AT VII 64–5) also requires an act of will. Descartes says that ‘when the mind understands, it in some way turns towards itself and inspects one of the ideas that are within it’ (CSM II 51/AT VII 73), and for Descartes, as for Aquinas, turning the mind towards its ideas requires an act of volition.24 Thus to produce further ideas of mathematical shapes in one’s thought requires that one turn one’s attention to the previously acquired idea of extension, through an act of will. In sum, having the idea of extension is both necessary and sufficient for being able to think up other shapes, even if one has not had sensory

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experience of those shapes. The idea of extension, for Descartes, is an innate idea implicit in our sense-perceptions, which is rendered explicit through reflection on those perceptions, and which allows one to recognize that one has innate ideas of all sorts of shapes. And, as I argued in the previous section, recognizing that one has the idea of extension requires sensation. Thus, although we can indeed perceive ideas of ‘countless’ shapes without having had sense-perceptions of those shapes, sense-perception is nonetheless a necessary condition for having the ability to do so. But surely, one might object, even someone who has not meditated and thus has not yet discovered that the nature of body is to be extended can nonetheless think up various shapes which she has never perceived. I think Descartes would respond to this challenge by suggesting that someone who can think up unperceived shapes must have some inkling of the idea of extension; she may not perceive it as clearly and distinctly as she could, but she nonetheless perceives that bodies are extended, and that extension can take on various shapes. Of course, in this case the ideas of the imagined shapes would not be clear and distinct, either, since a distinct conception of a mode requires a distinct conception of that of which it is a mode. The reading I have given is an attempt to explain those texts in which Descartes suggests that we can have ideas of shapes which we have not perceived through the senses,25 while taking seriously both his suggestion that we have an idea of extension ‘as a result of sensory stimulation’ (CSM I 223/AT VIIIA 40) and the role that the idea of extension plays in the Meditations. But there are more passages to reckon with. In the Conversation with Burman and in Principles I 59, Descartes seems to suggest that our sense-perceptions of various shapes in the world play a more direct role in our perception of our innate ideas of those things. That is, instead of merely holding that the sensory-inspired perception of our idea of extension leads us to perceive our innate ideas of specific shapes, Descartes sometimes suggests that a specific sense-perception of some particular shape leads us to perceive the innate idea of that shape. As we have already seen, in the Fifth Replies, Descartes insists that a childhood perception of a drawn triangle cannot give us the idea of a perfect triangle, for the drawn triangle is itself imperfect (CSM II 262/AT VII 381–2). We can have an idea of a true triangle by perceiving triangles with our senses only because we already possess the idea of the true triangle. But Burman objects that ‘it is from the imperfect triangle that you frame in your mind the perfect triangle.’ That is, Burman thinks that an imperfect triangle can serve as the source for an idea of a perfect triangle, that there is no need for an innate idea of a perfect triangle to exist in the mind prior


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to the perception of the imperfect triangle. The rest of his exchange with Descartes goes as follows: [Descartes] But why then does the imperfect triangle provide me with the idea of a perfect triangle rather than an idea of itself? [Burman] It provides you with both: firstly itself, and then, from that, the perfect triangle. For you deduce the perfect triangle from the imperfect. [Descartes] That cannot be. I could not conceive of an imperfect triangle unless there were in me the idea of a perfect one, since the former is the negation of the latter. Thus, when I see a triangle, I have a conception of a perfect triangle, and it is by comparison with this that I subsequently realize that what I am seeing is imperfect . . . (CSMK III 344/AT V 162) In addition to claiming that the idea of the perfect triangle must be prior to the perception of the imperfect triangle, Descartes seems to be saying that the sense-perception of the imperfect triangle is a kind of catalyst for perceiving the perfect triangle, for it is ‘when I see a triangle’ that I conceive the idea of the perfect triangle. The perfect triangle exists objectively in the intellect and is, Descartes suggests, explicitly perceived on the occasion of the sense-perception of the imperfect triangle. This also seems to be Descartes’ point in Principles I 59. Addressing the topic ‘How universals arise,’ Descartes indicates that our perceptions of the ideas of ‘two’ and ‘triangle’ derive in a certain sense from sense-perceptions of, respectively, two objects and triangular shapes in the world. He writes: when we see two stones, for example, and direct our attention not to their nature but merely to the fact that there are two of them, we form the idea of the number which we call ‘two’; and when we later see two birds or two trees, and consider not their nature but merely the fact that there are two of them, we go back to the same idea as before. . . . In the same way, when we see a figure made up of three lines, we form an idea of it which we call the idea of a triangle. (CSM I 212/AT VIIIA 27–8) The language he uses here is a little different from that of the Conversation with Burman. Rather than saying that when he perceives the imperfect triangle he ‘has a conception’ of the true triangle, he says here that he ‘forms’ an idea of the triangle. But Descartes uses similar language to describe our perception of the innate idea of God; in both cases, the idea

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he ‘forms’ is an innate idea in the material sense, a perception of the objectively existing nature. But what is the process by which a perception of an external-world triangle can help one make explicit the idea of the perfect triangle? In other words, how is it that ‘when we see a figure made up of three lines, we form an idea of it which we call the idea of a triangle’? What is the mental process by which the sense-perception leads us to perceive the idea of the true, perfect triangle? Unfortunately, Descartes provides us with no more details regarding this process. Indeed, Rule Twelve from Descartes’ Rules for the Direction of the Mind seems to indicate that he lacked a worked-out view about precisely this matter. In his account of the three types of simple natures, he provides brief explanations of how the purely intellectual and ‘common’ simples are supposed to be known (CSM I 44–5/AT X 419). It is so easy to know the purely intellectual ones, he says, that ‘all we need is some degree of rationality’; I have interpreted this to mean that these ideas are implicit in the very process of thinking, because they are relied on in those thoughts, and thus that they can be discovered by attending to those thoughts. The common notions, Descartes says, ‘can be known either by the pure intellect or by the intellect as it intuits the images of material things.’ In my discussion of the Cartesian natural light, I showed how we can give a roughly analogous account of these ideas, too. But Descartes says nothing at all about how the ‘purely material’ simple natures are known. And this lacuna in his account does not seem to be filled in by any of his later writings, either. Plato’s Phaedo presents the view that sensory-perceptions can serve as catalysts for us to perceive certain eternal Forms, so we might hope that Plato’s account would be of some use in interpreting Descartes’ view. Ultimately, I do not think this is so, but it may be instructive to see why. In the Phaedo, Socrates asks Cebes and Simmias: Whenever someone, on seeing something, realizes that that which he now sees wants to be like some other reality but falls short and cannot be like that other since it is inferior, do we agree that the one who thinks this must have prior knowledge of that to which he says it is like, but deficient?26 According to the view that Plato develops in this dialogue, before birth we possess knowledge of the perfect Forms, which we then forget at birth. Socrates points out that in ordinary cases of recollection, we remember things not just on the basis of perceiving something similar to the


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recollected item, but also, sometimes, on the basis of perceiving something dissimilar.27 In the passage cited above, however, Plato seems to have Socrates suggest that Forms are recollected by means of the perception of something that is similar, but deficient, to the Form. We come to be reminded of the Form of the Equal, for example, by perceiving particular objects that appear to be equal, but which can also, under different circumstances, seem not to be equal.28 Scholars disagree on precisely how to interpret the doctrine of recollection that Plato proposes in this dialogue, but for our purposes here it is not necessary to enter into these debates. As we saw in Chapter 1, Descartes himself alludes to the doctrine of recollection in both a letter to Voetius and the Fifth Meditation, but he gives no sign in either case that he is endorsing it.29 But one could adopt Plato’s suggestion that sense-perceptions can serve as stimuli for perceiving innate ideas without adopting the thesis that this perception is recollection.30 So perhaps Descartes holds a view like the one Socrates outlines in the Phaedo. After all, for Descartes, as for Plato, we come to think of a ‘true’ idea by means of some experience which is similar, but deficient, to the true idea. As we have seen, for Descartes this experience may involve the senses, but it may also involve some thought which we have by virtue of the pure intellect. Plato’s solution to the problem of how a particular can make us think of a Form might suggest a way to understand Descartes’ view that reflection on particular experiences brings to mind the principles and concepts on which those experiences rely. But I do not think this will turn out to be a fruitful line of inquiry. It is part of Plato’s view that the particulars we experience are importantly different from the Forms, just because they are particulars and not the Forms. Later in the Phaedo, Socrates suggests that the particulars ‘share in’ the Forms, but he is rather vague about what this ‘sharing in’ amounts to: I simply, naively, and perhaps foolishly cling to this, that nothing else makes [a beautiful thing] beautiful other than the presence of, or the sharing in, or however you may describe its relationship to that Beautiful we mentioned, for I will not insist on the precise nature of the relationship, but that all beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful.31 So appealing to what Plato means by ‘similarity’ between the particulars and the Forms will not yield an account that we can straightforwardly apply to Descartes’ view. Descartes, I suggest, is just as vague on this as Plato is; he does not give any account of how an instantiated shape can bring to mind

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the idea of the true shape. Perhaps he would appeal to a natural arrangement set up by God, but if this is his view, he does not say so.

6.4 Perceiving Geometrical Propositions I have so far been examining Descartes’ views on our innate ideas of the geometrical shapes that extension can take. But Descartes also refers in various texts to propositional geometrical ideas. For example, in a 1643 letter to Voetius Descartes refers to Geometricae veritates, reminding us that in Plato’s Meno, ‘Socrates asks a slave boy about the elements of geometry and thereby makes the boy able to dig out certain truths from his own mind which he had not previously recognized were there’ (CSMK III 222–3/AT VIIIB 167). The truth that Socrates enables the slave boy of the Meno to ‘dig out . . . from his own mind’ is that double the area of a given square can be obtained by squaring the diagonal of that square.32 Other mathematical propositions which Descartes refers to in his works are Euclidean: for example, in the Meditations the meditator says that even if no triangles exist (and hence even if he has no sensory experience of a triangle), he can still demonstrate from the nature of a triangle that ‘its three angles equal two right angles’ (CSM II 45/AT VII 64), which is part of Euclid’s Proposition 32, and that ‘its greatest side subtends its greatest angle’ (CSM II 45/AT VII 64), which is Proposition 18.33 In the letter to Voetius, Descartes emphasizes that we can learn ‘geometrical truths’ merely ‘by the power of our own native intelligence, without any sensory experience’ (CSMK III 222/AT VIIIB 166). Of course, I argued earlier that, according to Descartes, to perceive our innate ideas of shapes, we require either particular sensory experiences of shapes or (to think up unperceived shapes) the sensory-inspired idea of extension. Thus, since we must have the idea of a triangle before we can perceive truths about triangles, it is not strictly true that no sensory experience is needed to come to know these truths. Descartes’ point is thus that, once we have the initial idea of a shape, no further sensory experience is needed in order to discover various truths about it. In a letter to Mersenne, Descartes writes that he can ‘draw out from an innate idea something which was implicitly contained in it but which I did not at first notice in it. Thus I can draw out from the idea of a triangle that its three angles equal two right angles’ (CSMK III 184/AT III 383). The verb used here, eruo, is the same as that used in the letter to Voetius; it means ‘dig out’ or ‘draw forth.’34 Descartes is thus suggesting that propositional


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mathematical truths are made explicit through a kind of ‘drawing-out’ from some initial idea. This also seems to be his general point when he writes in the Fifth Meditation that there are ‘countless particular features regarding shape, number, motion, and so on, which I perceive when I give them my attention’; such features are, arguably, propositional truths about shapes, numbers, and so on. The meditator goes on to say that perceiving such truths ‘seems like noticing for the first time things which were long present within me although I had never turned my mental gaze on them before’ (CSM II 44/AT VII 63–4). These truths, then, are ‘in him,’ and are drawn out through attending to them with his ‘mental gaze.’ Once again, attention is a central concept in Descartes’ account of our perceptions of innate ideas. I will return to the issue of attention at the end of this section. Although Descartes stresses that the drawing-out of further facts about mathematical objects does not require sensation, he does seem to have thought that it requires the imagination, and cannot be carried out by the pure intellect on its own.35 The passage in the letter to Voetius is consistent with this reading, for when Descartes says there that the geometrical truths are known ‘by the powers of our own native intelligence,’ the word translated as ‘native intelligence’ is ingenium. In the Rules, ingenium is explicitly linked with the formation of and concentration on ideas in the corporeal imagination, rather than with the pure intellect (CSM I 42/AT X 416). In the Meditations, the word ingenium is used in a generic way to characterize the human mind, rather than any specific part of the mind such as the pure intellect, the will, or the imagination.36 Descartes often suggests that the imagination is a useful tool in the discovery of mathematical truths. In a 1643 letter to Elizabeth, he maintains that thinking about mathematical truths differs from thinking about metaphysical truths insofar as the former involves the use of the imagination: Metaphysical thoughts, which exercise the pure intellect, help to familiarize us with the notion of the soul; and the study of mathematics, which exercises mainly the imagination in the consideration of shapes and motions, accustoms us to form very distinct notions of body. (CSMK III 227/AT III 692) Likewise, in a letter to Mersenne of 1639, Descartes comments that ‘the imagination . . . is the part of the mind that most helps mathematics’ (CSMK III 141/AT II 622). One role for the imagination which Descartes may have had in mind is the consideration of diagrams, for in Descartes’ algebraic geometry as well

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as in Euclidean demonstrations, diagrams play an essential role.37 As I have pointed out, Descartes mentions two mathematical truths corresponding to Euclidean Propositions 18 and 32, which, in the standard Euclidean texts, are both accompanied by diagrams. Indeed, these diagrams are crucial to the success of the Euclidean demonstrations. If Descartes believes that these diagrams are necessary for the success of the demonstrations, then the procedure of drawing out further truths about geometrical objects would not be an operation of the intellect alone, for the contemplation of a diagram is, according to Descartes, a job for the imagination. And, indeed, although Descartes’ Geometry introduced an algebraic method for solving geometrical construction problems,38 diagrams are still necessary for the application of his method of geometrical analysis.39 Analysis assumes at the beginning that that which is sought has been found; thus although the sought-after item cannot be described with algebraic certainty, it needs to be represented in the diagram, so that one can then assign labels for use in the equations by means of which one will solve the problem. These equations, in turn, must be based on geometrical relationships, some of which are read off from the diagram (although some of them may be found in the text stating the conditions of the problem). Much of the method consists in algebraic manipulation, until one has an equation which can be solved for the unknown line segment; a geometrical diagram is then necessary in order to find that solution, to find the roots of the equation. The diagram may, in some cases, also assist one in selecting the appropriate roots, although Descartes did not comment on this step. Clearly, then, although Descartes’ algebraic method managed to eliminate much of the reliance on diagrams required by Greek geometrical methods, the diagram was still a necessary component of geometrical problem-solving. And, since Descartes never tried to apply his method to anything but construction problems, he evidently believed the methods used by the Greek geometers were necessary for proving geometrical theorems; and such methods were even more dependent on the diagram. There can be no doubt that Descartes would take the use of figures to require the use of the imagination. In the Discourse he says that he chose to use line-segments in his method of algebraic geometry ‘because [he] did not find anything simpler, nor anything that [he] could represent more distinctly to [his] imagination and senses’ (CSM I 121/AT VI 20). And, also in the Discourse, he says that one fault of the ancient method of geometry was that it relied too heavily on diagrams, for such figures ‘tire the imagination’ (CSM I 119/AT VI 17). Clearly, then, to rely upon diagrams requires that one use either one’s senses (to perceive an actual diagram), or one’s imagination (to picture the diagram in thought).


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It thus seems that although the attention involved in the perception of mathematical innate ideas is an act of the pure intellect,40 such perception nonetheless requires more than just the pure intellect. Sensation is required, since our innate ideas of shapes and other mathematical concepts can only be acquired through attention to sense-perceptions, which gives us the idea of extension as well as some specific ideas of shapes and numbers. Imagination is then required for the drawing-out of further truths about those concepts. Margaret Wilson has raised two objections to Descartes’ claim that we can make implicit mathematical truths explicit through attending to the ideas which contain them. Responding to McRae’s original suggestion that Descartes thinks we are implicitly aware of our own thoughts and that we can become explicitly aware of those thoughts through attention, she concedes that Descartes’ view makes some sense,41 but she maintains that it does not make sense to say that we are implicitly aware of the truths that Descartes thinks are contained in certain innate ideas, particularly the mathematical ones.42 And, as I have already indicated, it does indeed seem that there is an important disanalogy between the ideas of pure thought and the mathematical ideas. Natures of pure thought and the common natures are perceivable, I have argued, because they are relied on in thought. And the truths perceived by the natural light are, again, such that we need only attend to our past thoughts in order to discover them. But ideas of corporeal nature are not—indeed, cannot be—displayed in thought in the same way. Descartes only uses words like experientia, conscientia, and internum testimonium when he is characterizing our knowledge of natures that we depend on in the process of thinking. Still, even if corporeal natures are not displayed in the process of thinking, Descartes does think that, in a certain way, ideas of corporeal nature are relied on in our thoughts. That is, these ideas are implicitly present in our sense-perceptions (at least, our visual perceptions) and in the images we form through the imagination. We are implicitly aware of them because we can perceive these ideas through attention to those mental images. Such ideas are available to the attending intellect once we have any sense-perception at all—which means, for human thinkers, that they are, theoretically, perceivable from the moment of birth, although the intellect must practice meditating before it can acquire these ideas, just as it must meditate in order to acquire ideas of pure intellect and common ideas.43 The important feature of implicit awareness is that we have a capacity to perceive that of which we have such awareness. It may take more work for us to perceive some ideas than others; as Wilson points out, it may be harder for her to perceive some abstruse mathematical truth

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than to perceive that she doubts, for example; but nonetheless Descartes insists that she has a capacity for both, because of her mental history and her ability to reflect on that mental experience. Thus Descartes will deny that there is a significant difference between the mathematical and purely intellectual cases. Wilson also objects that we cannot make the ‘contents’ of our idea of a triangle distinct simply by attending to that idea; that process requires ‘effort and analysis,’ which is more than just mere attention can provide. And she implies that what she calls ‘the metaphor of “attention” ’ is insufficient to account for the possibility of error and ignorance.44 However, for Descartes, attention involves more ‘effort and analysis’ than Wilson suspects. In the first place, proper attention may also require some preparatory work. One thing worth noting is that although Descartes does indeed sometimes suggest that it is simply by attending to the idea of a triangle that we discover that the sum of its three angles equals two right angles, he actually qualifies this claim at the end of the Fifth Meditation. The meditator says, ‘when I consider the nature of a triangle, it appears most evident to me, steeped as I am in the principles of geometry, that its three angles are equal to two right angles’ (CSM II 48/AT VII 69). In other words, for attention to a triangle to reveal this truth to him, he must first have learned some facts and principles of geometry.45 Likewise, for the analysis in the Meditations to be successful, the meditator must first have gone through the method of doubt, directing his mind away from the senses. In the second place, proper attending also requires practice. Attention is a special skill that must be cultivated, and it requires the sustained effort of the will to maintain; it is not simply like looking. Meditation requires a sort of perspicuous intuition that is analogous to the trained vision of a craftsman, rather than to the ‘confused’ attention of the ordinary, untrained observer, who attempts to attend to too much (CSM I 33/AT X 400–1). Wilson seems to assume that the metaphor of attention is like mere looking, the sort of thing that we do every day; but proper attention, which requires some practice, does involve some degree of ‘effort and analysis.’

6.5 Perceiving Other Mathematical Propositions There are two kinds of mathematical propositions which Descartes sometimes mentions, but about which he has very little to say: arithmetical propositions such as ‘2 + 3 = 5,’ and the Euclidean-style common notions, or axioms.46


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Consider the arithmetical propositions first. Descartes frequently says he is certain of the truth of these propositions. For example, the proposition that ‘two and three added together are five’ plays a role in the First Meditation, when the meditator suggests this as an example of a ‘transparent truth’ that he can’t doubt, at least until he raises the specter of an omnipotent yet deceptive God who might be deceiving him about even this (CSM II 14/AT VII 20). It recurs as an example in the Third Meditation, where the meditator again offers it as a case of a proposition so convincing that it cannot be doubted while it is being contemplated (CSM II 25/AT VII 36). Yet in his discussions of innate ideas and how we come to know them, Descartes does not rely on arithmetical examples. Indeed, one might wonder whether Descartes thinks arithmetical truths are in fact innately known. But I think it is reasonable to hold that arithmetical propositions are among the Cartesian innate ideas. Descartes reportedly told Burman that the number three is innate (CSMK III 347/AT V 165); and if the number three is innate, then surely all numbers must be innate, for why should the number three be particularly privileged? Moreover, if numbers are innate, then it seems that propositions expressing relationships among numbers, such as 2 + 3 = 5, should also be innate. Descartes hints at this view in the Fifth Meditation, when he alludes to Plato’s doctrine of recollection in his assertion that there are ‘countless particular features regarding shape, number, motion, and so on, which I perceive when I give them my attention’ (CSM II 44/AT VII 63–4). The implication seems to be that these particular features are also innately known. However, Descartes does not explicitly address how such arithmetical innate ideas might be perceived. One possibility is that he would give an account of ‘drawing out’ these truths, analogous to the account described in the previous section of how thinkers use the imagination to ‘draw out’ geometrical propositions from the ideas of the shapes which ‘contain’ these propositions. After all, in the 1639 letter to Mersenne quoted earlier, Descartes says that the imagination helps ‘mathematics’ generally (CSMK III 141/AT II 622); in other words, he does not restrict the role of the imagination in mathematics simply to the study of geometry. On the other hand, in his 1643 letter to Elizabeth (also quoted in the previous section), Descartes emphasizes the role of the imagination in thinking about ‘shapes and motions,’ and does not mention any role it might play in thinking about numbers (CSMK III 227/AT III 692). It is not clear, then, how Descartes might account for the perception of arithmetical propositions. What about the Euclidean-style common notions, or axioms? In the Rules for the Regulation of the Mind Descartes lists, as examples of common notions,

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Euclid’s first common notion: ‘Things that are the same as a third thing are the same as each other,’ along with ‘Things that cannot be related in the same way to a third thing are different in some respect’ (CSM I 45/AT X 419–20).47 In the Principles, he mentions Euclid’s second axiom, that ‘if you add equals to equals the results will be equal,’ when he is explaining the common notions which one will find in one’s mind (CSM I 197/AT VIIIA 9). And in a letter of May 1644, Descartes writes that ‘in the case of a universal and indeterminate cause, it seems to be a common notion of the most evident kind that whatever can do the greater can also do the lesser; it is as evident as the maxim that the whole is greater than the part’ (CSMK III 231/AT IV 111). This ‘maxim’ is Euclid’s fifth axiom.48 But how does this type of common notion come to be known? In the Rules, Descartes says that the common notions ‘can be known either by the pure intellect or by the intellect as it intuits the images of material things’ (CSM I 45/AT X 419–20). Since imagination and some forms of sensation involve the use of mental images,49 he is apparently claiming that the Euclidean common notions can be known with or without the use of imagination or sensation. Other, later texts seem to add a minor qualification to Descartes’ claim in the Rules that the Euclidean common notions can indeed be known by pure intellect. This can only happen, it seems, if the knower has some expertise in exercising the pure intellect. Descartes says in the Appendix to the Fifth Objections and Replies that when we teach a child the elements of geometry we will not be able to get him to understand the general proposition ‘When equal quantities are taken from equal amounts the remaining amounts will be equal’, or ‘The whole is greater than its parts’, unless we show him examples in particular cases. (CSM II 271/AT IXA 206) Descartes’ main point here, which he repeats elsewhere, is that general propositions are discovered through the knowledge of particular truths, but for our purposes the above passage is interesting because it suggests that a child must be shown examples in order to see the particular truths. In other words, a child cannot discover the axioms in the first way that Descartes mentions in the Rules, through the use of the pure intellect. This is not surprising, of course, given what we have seen in Chapter 3 about children’s inability to use the pure intellect. Without having developed enough constancy of will to direct the intellect away from the senses, it is not possible for someone to learn truths through the use of the pure


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intellect. Under such circumstances, the Euclidean common notions must be perceived with the aid of the imagination, generalizing from particular examples. In the Conversation with Burman, Descartes also suggests that the prephilosophical person will also be unable to discover the common notions through the use of the pure intellect, despite the fact that we actually have particular examples of common notions before us all the time (CSMK III 332/AT V 146). Only those who can focus their intellectual attention on their own thoughts will be able to discover the common notions in this way, and this takes some practice. As Descartes tells Burman, ‘men who are creatures of the senses, as we all are at a pre-philosophical level, do not think about these or pay attention to them’; rather, ‘we neglect them and think about them only in a confused manner, and never in the abstract, or apart from material things and particular instances’ (CSMK III 332–3/AT V 146). In fact Descartes says in the Second Set of Replies that ‘the primary notions which are presupposed for the demonstration of geometrical truths are readily accepted by anyone, since they accord with the use of our senses’ (CSM II 111/AT VII 156). He seems to be suggesting here that in general we do learn them through intuiting images, and not through attending to the thoughts of the pure intellect. But, since Descartes at least allows that these common notions could be known through the pure intellect alone, without turning to sensory images, how does he think the pure intellect could accomplish this? He gives us very little to go on, but he might think the process by which we perceive such Euclidean-style common notions resembles the process by which we perceive truths known by the natural light. Consider the truth that ‘Things that are the same as a third thing are the same as each other.’ This truth is a general claim about the relationship between things of a certain type. Perhaps Descartes would want to say that this truth is contained in the concept of ‘equality’ or ‘sameness,’ so that in using concepts like ‘equal’ and ‘the same,’ we are implicitly relying on such a principle. To discover this axiom, we could use the pure intellect to attend to our past use of the notion of equality—for example, cases where we have asserted that two thoughts of pure intellect are the same. That is, we would be making explicit our implicit awareness of the common notion, an awareness manifested in the fact that some of our thoughts (of pure intellect) have relied on that common notion. Or, to give another example, even if no one shows us, on paper, an example of the truth that the whole is greater than its part, examples of this truth might have occurred in our own thinking; since Descartes thinks of some ideas as ‘containing’ others,

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perhaps he would see the contained idea as a ‘part’ of the one which contains it. By reflecting on some past thought which was an example of being a whole, or a part, the general truth that the whole is greater than the part could then be perceived. As a matter of fact, I do not think that the Meditations shows us such Euclidean-style common notions being made explicit, but of course that is not the aim of the work. Descartes’ claim that the Euclidean common notions can be known either with or without corporeal images suggests, I think, that it is not really accurate to call them ‘geometrical.’ Only insofar as we discover these truths through the use of images can they be called ‘geometrical.’ This is just what Descartes means when he says in the Rules that the common notions are ‘common’: they, like the common simples, ‘are to be ascribed indifferently, now to corporeal things, now to spirits’ (CSM I 45/AT X 419). As we have seen, the truths that Descartes says are known by the natural light are discoverable by pure intellect reflecting on its own thoughts, and truths about the natures of mathematical objects require the use of either sensation or imagination. The Euclidean common notions fall midway between these two groups, being discoverable either with or without the use of sensation and imagination.

6.6 Descartes’ Laws of Motion Much of the discussion in this book has been structured around Descartes’ distinctions in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind between ‘purely intellectual’ simple natures, ‘purely material’ simple natures, common simples, and propositional common notions (CSM I 44–5/AT X 419–20). In this chapter, I have focused on Descartes’ account of our innate ideas of the purely material simple natures and the truths related to them. But the passage in the Rules from which this set of distinctions is drawn seems to suggest another kind of innate idea related to extension, for when explaining ‘those simple natures . . . which seem to be present only in bodies,’ the examples Descartes cites are ‘shape, extension, and motion’ (CSM I 45/AT X 419). I have already addressed the first two of these concepts, shape and extension. Given Descartes’ inclusion of ‘motion’ with the natures of shape and extension in this passage, one might wonder whether he thinks that ideas pertaining to motion are also innate. In particular, one might wonder whether the laws of nature described in Part Two of the Principles of Philosophy are among the Cartesian innate ideas.


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Some of the language Descartes uses to describe these laws, which all pertain to motion, seems to echo language used to describe concepts and propositions that he does explicitly identify as innate. For example, he says that motion is among the features of body that we ‘clearly perceive’ (CSM I 217/ AT VIIIA 33), and he describes his laws of nature as ‘deduced from indubitable common notions so evidently’ that their derivation may be treated as ‘a mathematical demonstration’ (CSM I 247/AT VIIIA 79). Indeed, he describes his ‘principles of material things’ as being derived from ‘the light of reason [a lumine rationis]’ (CSM I 248/AT VIIIA 80). Moreover, in deriving these laws, Descartes suggests that they can be discovered through reflection on the idea of God, and in particular by reflecting on God’s immutability,50 suggesting a parallel with the accounts developed throughout this book of how the Cartesian meditator reveals innate ideas through attention to his own thoughts. These all strike me as legitimate reasons for thinking that these ideas, too, are among Cartesian innate ideas, even though Descartes never explicitly identifies them as such. Parts Three and Four of the Principles also contain numerous other principles of the material world, concerning the earth’s motion, celestial phenomena, the tides, heat, ice, metals, magnets, and so on. Since Descartes describes these as the ‘consequences’ or ‘effects’ of the principles discovered in Part Two, one might worry that including the latter principles among the innate ideas would require including the former (the particular principles from Parts Three and Four) as innate, too. Since the particular principles concern empirical matters of fact about how the cosmos behaves, treating them as innate would seem to collapse Descartes’ distinction between adventitious and innate ideas. However, Descartes himself acknowledges that these principles must be confirmed by experience. He suggests at the beginning of Part Three that a tremendous variety of effects is consistent with the laws of nature derived in Part Two (CSM I 249/AT VIIIA 81); to know which particular principles actually obtain in our universe requires empirical observation. As he puts it in a discussion of the sizes and speeds of the basic particles of the universe, ‘Since there are countless different configurations which God might have instituted here, experience alone must teach us which configurations he actually selected in preference to the rest’ (CSM I 256/AT VIIIA 101). In other words, while various particular principles may be thought up through reason alone, they cannot be known to be true without testing them through sensory experience. This is enough to suggest that they are not innate—at least not in the ‘fully’ innate sense described in Chapter 2.

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6.7 Conclusion Descartes treats our innate ideas of extension, particular shapes, and geometrical truths as analogous in some respects to our innate knowledge of the purely intellectual and common natures. In both cases, he considers the innate idea to be implicit in certain of our thoughts or ideas, and therefore perceivable, provided we attend to those thoughts. The central difference is that purely intellectual and common simple natures are implicit in the very process of thought, so no ideas of sense or imagination are necessary in order for a thinker to perceive them. I have argued that the ‘purely material’ natures, on the other hand, are implicit in our sense-perceptions, and thus that we need sensory perception in order to provide the data, as it were, on which the intellect can reflect. In sum, Descartes holds that for many innate ideas, the particular item we perceive (either with or without our senses) is an instance of the thing of which we have the innate idea. Thus, for example, a particular circle is an instantiated version of the perfect circle; a case of doubting is an instance of the nature of doubt; and a particular case of deception depending on a defect is an instance of the general truth that deception depends on a defect. One exception here is the idea of God; we don’t perceive God by means of perceiving an instance of God, but rather by perceiving something radically different from God, namely, a limitation. Once all these ideas have been explicitly perceived, further truths can be ‘drawn out’ out of them through further reflection. This gradual process of coming to perceive the innate ideas that our thoughts and ideas rely on is, I submit, what Descartes means by ‘analysis’ in metaphysics. As Descartes emphasizes in the Second Set of Replies, the synthetic method requires that definitions, postulates, and axioms be set out in advance; but the analytic method displays the process by which these things are discovered and drawn forth from the ‘treasure house’ of the mind, a process which requires careful, attentive, meditative practice.

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Parenthetical references to CSM and CSMK give the volume and page number for The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vols. 1 and 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 and 1985), and vol. 3, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) respectively. References to AT give the volume and page number for Oeuvres de Descartes, 12 vols., ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin/ C.N.R.S., 1957–1976; reprint, Paris: Vrin, 1996). As John Carriero has persuasively argued, ‘the central aim of the Meditations is to replace scholastic abstractionism with Descartes’s own nativism.’ John Carriero, ‘The First Meditation,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1987), p. 228. Our ideas of God, ourselves, thing, truth, and thought are said to be innate in the Third Meditation (CSM II 35/AT VII 51 and CSM II 26/AT VII 38). In a letter to Mersenne, Descartes says that our ideas of ‘mind, body, triangle, and in general all those which represent true, immutable and eternal essences’ are innate (CSMK III 183/AT III 383). The number three is identified as innate in the Conversation with Burman (CSMK III 347/AT V 165). Descartes never says, in so many words, that the idea of extension is innate, but I will argue in Chapter 6 that there is nonetheless good reason to think that he held it to be innate. As for geometrical truths, when Descartes tells Voetius that such truths are among the ‘things whose knowledge is said to be naturally implanted in us,’ he is undoubtedly saying that these truths are innate (CSMK III 222/AT VIIIB 166–7). He also says in both the Comments on a Certain Broadsheet and the Conversation with Burman that the common notions, such as ‘things which are equal to a third thing are equal to each other,’ are innate (CSM I 304/AT VIIIB 359 and CSMK III 332/ AT V 146). Finally, if the common notions are innate, then the truths the meditator says he perceives by the natural light are also innate, for, as I will argue in Chapter 5, the truths that the natural light reveals are the ‘common notions.’ See, for example, the Third Meditation (CSM II 35/AT VII 51); the First Set of Replies (CSM II 76/AT VII 105); and the Principles of Philosophy (CSM I 224/AT VIIIA 42). Vere Chappell, ‘The Theory of Ideas,’ in Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 179; Robert

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McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ in Cartesian Studies, ed. R. J. Butler (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1972), pp. 32–54. Robert McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ p. 33. See also Robert McRae, ‘Descartes’ Definition of Thought,’ in Cartesian Studies, ed. R. J. Butler (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1972), pp. 55–70. In fact, McRae does not think that Descartes held a dispositional view at all, so strictly speaking he only argues for the presence of two distinct Cartesian senses of ‘innate idea.’ I discuss McRae’s views in Chapters 2 and 3. John Cottingham, A Descartes Dictionary (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), and Descartes’ Conversation with Burman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 409; Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (n. p., 1968; reprint, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), pp. 104–5; Alexander Koyré, Essai sur l’idée de Dieu et les preuves de son existence chez Descartes (Paris: Éditions Ernest Leroux, 1922; reprint, New York: Garland, 1987), pp. 211–2; Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Middlesex: Pelican, 1978), p. 134. See Robert McRae, ‘ “Idea” as a Philosophical Term in the Seventeenth Century,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 26 (1965), pp. 175–90, for a brief but useful survey of these three senses of ‘idea’ in Descartes, Malebranche, Arnauld, Spinoza, and Leibniz. E. J. Ashworth also points out these senses of ‘idea’ in Descartes’ works, but does not pursue the point (E. J. Ashworth, ‘Descartes’ Theory of Objective Reality,’ The New Scholasticism 49 [1975], p. 331). Nicholas Jolley points out the three senses but maintains that they constitute an unresolved ambiguity in Descartes’ own thinking about innate ideas (Nicholas Jolley, The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche and Descartes [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990], pp. 17–22). Vere Chappell introduces the labels ‘ideao’ and ‘ideam’ in his paper ‘The Theory of Ideas,’ although he does not use these labels in the context of a discussion of innate ideas. Indeed, in introducing the examples, the meditator says only that these things ‘seem to be [esse videntur]’ simpler and more universal. Descartes published the Principles in 1644, at least 15 years after the composition of the Rules, and 3 years after the publication of the Meditations. See also Descartes’ unfinished dialogue, The Search For Truth, in which the character Eudoxus says that some things are ‘very simple and clear,’ and are ‘perceived and known just on their own’ (CSM II 417/AT X 524). He gives examples of doubt, thought, and existence. These are presumably examples of purely intellectual simples. The examples in the Rules are similar to Euclid’s common notions, while the examples in the Principles are ‘Nothing comes from nothing’ and ‘It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same time; What is done cannot be undone; He who thinks cannot but exist while he thinks’ (CSM I 209/AT VIIIA 23–4).

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Other commentators have remarked on the distinction Descartes notes in the Preface to the Meditations. See E. J. Ashworth, ‘Descartes’ Theory of Objective

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Reality,’ The New Scholasticism 49 (1975), p. 331; Vere Chappell, ‘The Theory of Ideas,’ in Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 177–98; and Robert McRae, ‘ “Idea” as a Philosophical Term in the Seventeenth Century,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 26 (1965), pp. 175–90. However, these writers do not address how the ambiguity of ‘idea’ might affect Descartes’ conception of innate ideas. Nicholas Jolley does consider this question, but concludes only that Descartes’ thinking about innate ideas is itself ambiguous (Nicholas Jolley, The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes, [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990], pp. 17–22). Gordon Baker and Katherine Morris point out this ambiguity, writing, in one sense it was clearly equivalent to ‘perception’ or ‘thought’ (in this sense ideas are what are clearly and distinctly perceived); in another it referred to the ‘figures’ ‘which are traced in the [animal] spirits on the surface of the [pineal] gland’ in the mechanical process of sense-perception (AT XI 176; CSM I 106). (Gordon Baker and Katherine Morris, Descartes’ Dualism [London: Routledge, 1996], p. 79, n. 50)

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But the passage that they cite in support of the second sense of ‘idea’ is from Descartes’ Treatise On Man, written roughly 10 years before the Meditations. In these earlier works, indeed, Descartes’ usage was ambiguous; but in the Second Replies passage, his usage of the term ‘idea’ in the Meditations, and his careful restriction of the word ‘perception’ in the Passions of the Soul to mental contexts show that he did not treat ‘idea’ as ambiguous in his later works, where he held that while both animals and human bodies can have images in their brains, caused by corporeal motions, only souls can have ideas. For reasons that will become clear later, there is also a problem with their claim that ideas are equivalent to perceptions, for this actually fails to consider a way in which Descartes explicitly asserts that ‘idea’ is ambiguous, namely, between a ‘material’ sense and an ‘objective’ sense (see the Preface to the Meditations, CSM II 7/AT VII 8). There has been some debate concerning the exact dates of composition of the Rules for the Direction of the Mind. I follow Stephen Gaukroger, who himself follows J.-P. Weber, in holding that the Rules were written in 1619–20 and 1626–8 (Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995], p. 111). See also CSM I 58/AT X 441, where Descartes refers back to the Rule Twelve passage and says that ‘we conceived of the imagination [phantasiam], along with the ideas [ideis] existing in it, as being nothing but a real body with a real extension and shape.’ Gaukroger, Descartes, p. 227. For example, he writes that ‘everyone is commonly convinced that the ideas we have in our mind [les idées que nous avons en notre pensée] are wholly similar to the objects from which they proceed’ (CSM I 81/AT XI 3); he asks ‘Do you think the idea of this sound, as it is formed in our mind [l’idée de ce son, qui se forme en notre pensée], is anything like the object which is its cause?’ (CSM I 82/AT XI 5); and he says that ‘the ideas [les idées] of tickling and of pain . . . are formed in our mind

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[en notre pensée] on the occasion of our being touched by external bodies’ (CSM I 82/AT XI 5–6). Gaukroger, Descartes, p. 227. Thus, on this account of ‘ideas,’ Descartes could say that animals have ideas. And in fact in a letter of 1630, he does seem to attribute ideas to animals (CSM I 20/AT I 134). This is a rather large claim, which I do not have the space here to elaborate. In his book The Method of Descartes, one of the few works devoted to an examination of Descartes’ Rules For the Direction of the Mind, Lesley Beck points out that Descartes assumes a distinction between mind and body when he asserts, in the first Rule, that people ‘wrongly compare the sciences, which consist wholly in knowledge acquired by the mind, with the arts, which require some bodily aptitude and practice’ (CSM I 9/AT X 359; cited in Lesley Beck, The Method of Descartes [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952], p. 22). However, it is one thing to contrast mind and body and another to argue that they are distinct substances. Even in Rule Twelve, where Descartes sets out his views on intellect, imagination, and sensation, he says nothing to suggest that mind and body are two distinct substances; indeed, the only time he mentions mind and body in that Rule, he says that the body is ‘informed by the mind [ab illâ informetur]’ (CSM I 40/AT X 411), which, as Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch point out in their footnote, conveys an Aristotelian view of the relationship between mind and body (CSM I 40). Thus it seems likely to me that Descartes rather unreflectively adopted a distinction between mind and body early on, while only later developing this distinction into his two-substances view. Curiously, in his latest works, Descartes seems to have eschewed the term ‘idea’ altogether. In the Passions of the Soul, Descartes uses ‘perception’ instead (the French is also ‘perception’). But this word clearly has a mental connotation; whenever he uses the word ‘perception,’ it is in the context of a discussion of the soul. To describe the mechanical production of images in the brain, he uses the word ‘image,’ not ‘idea’ or ‘perception’ (CSM I 341–2/AT XI 355–6). Chappell, ‘The Theory of Ideas,’ p. 177. The fact that Cartesian ideas can be conceptions can help make sense of a puzzle raised by the meditator’s claim that when we will, fear, affirm or deny, ‘there is always a particular thing which I take as the object of my thought, but my thought includes something more than the likeness of that thing’ (CSM II 26/AT VII 37). An affirmation, the meditator seems to be saying, consists of a likeness or quasiimage of some object, plus something else. But surely affirmations must be made of propositions; one does not affirm a picture. The same goes for willings and denials, though less clearly for fearings. However, if ideas can be conceptions, it is easier to see how this account can go; for conceptions can be expressed as propositions. Indeed, Descartes says in a letter that ideas (whether of pure mind or of imagination) can be expressed either by terms or by propositions (CSMK III 186/AT III 395; Descartes uses the French words ‘noms’ and ‘propositions’). Descartes seems willing, in other words, to classify as ideas both concepts and propositions. This means, of course, that we cannot tell simply from the form in which an idea is expressed—if it were possible to inspect someone’s ideas— whether or not that idea is one to which the thinker has assented; that is, the fact that some idea is in propositional form does not mean that it is yet a judgment.

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For a discussion of the concept of awareness as it applies to Descartes, see Chapter 3. Chappell, ‘The Theory of Ideas,’ p. 178. Ibid., p. 193. Lilli Alanen, Descartes’s Concept of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 116. Chappell, ‘The Theory of Ideas,’ p. 179. Robert McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ in Cartesian Studies, ed. R. J. Butler (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1972), p. 51. See also Robert McRae, ‘Descartes’ Definition of Thought,’ in Cartesian Studies, ed. R. J. Butler (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1972), pp. 55–70. McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ pp. 49–50. Ibid., p. 50. Moreover, Descartes cautions that ‘this should be understood merely as an analogy, for nothing quite like this power is to be found in corporeal things’ (CSM I 42/AT X 415). McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ p. 52. Ibid., p. 53. John Cottingham, Descartes’ Conversation with Burman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. xxxii–xxxiii. Ibid., p. xxxiii. Steven Nadler, ‘The Doctrine of Ideas,’ in The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), p. 96. Desmond Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), p. 196. Ibid., p. 162, n. 3. Cottingham, Descartes’ Conversation with Burman, p. xxxiii. Ibid. Other passages Cottingham cites are Sections One and Nine of the Conversation with Burman and Principles of Philosophy I 71 (ibid.). See also John Cottingham, A Descartes Dictionary (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), p. 92. Cottingham, Descartes’ Conversation with Burman, p. xxxiii. One might wonder, then, why Descartes mentions only object and act in the Preface to the Meditations. The reason for this is, I think, that he is speaking of the ambiguity of ‘idea’ generally speaking, not the ambiguity of ‘innate idea.’ Chappell correctly points out that the passages in which Descartes writes of ideas as dispositions pertain only to innate ideas (Chappell, ‘The Theory of Ideas,’ p. 179); thus any characterization of ideas in general (which would include the adventitious and the factitious as well as the innate) ought not to mention this third sense. I am indebted to Stephen Engstrom for suggesting these points to me. McRae is, in fact, never explicit about which ideas this ‘theory’ of innateness is supposed to apply to. Sometimes he seems to restrict it to the ideas of the shapes which extension can take, as when he says that it applies to ‘the ideas of geometrical figures’ (McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ p. 44) or to ‘my ideas of the possible figures in extension’ (ibid., pp. 46–7). His reference to ‘the concepts of geometry’ (ibid., p. 46) seems to include somewhat more than just the figures, unless we take it that points and lines count as figures. Elsewhere, referring to ‘the whole science of geometry’ (ibid., p. 45) and ‘the ideas and truths of geometry’ (ibid., p. 47),

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he seems to want to include properties of geometrical figures (that is, truths such as ‘the interior angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles’) among the ideas that this type of innateness characterizes. I take it that he wants to include all of these under the modified anamnesis account. Plato, Meno, in Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 81d. Augustine, On the Trinity, ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 146–7. Ibid., p. 211. Augustine, The Greatness of the Soul. The Teacher, trans. and annotated by Joseph M. Colleran (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1950), p. 54. Augustine, Retractations 1.7.4, cited by Colleran, Greatness of the Soul, p. 204, n. 48. (Colleran’s citation of 1.8.4 is surely a misprint.) Ronald Nash suggests that we read Augustine’s talk of recollection as a recollection of the present: ‘Man does not remember truths learned in some previous existence but actualizes latent or virtual knowledge of necessary truth that has been stored in what Augustine calls the memory’ (Ronald H. Nash, The Light of the Mind: St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge [Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1969], p. 83). Gregory Vlastos, ‘Anamnesis in the Meno,’ Dialogue 4, no. 2 (1965), p. 156. Quoted in McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ p. 48. McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ p. 47. I discuss the idea of extension in Chapter 6. Augustine, On the Trinity, p. 153. McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ p. 46. At the end of an interesting critique of McRae’s thesis that the idea of extension is adventitious (a thesis I discuss in Chapter 6), Murray Miles suggests that perhaps the idea of body is discovered through the intellect’s reflection on itself (Murray Miles, ‘The Idea of Extension: Innate or Adventitious? On R. F. McRae’s Interpretation of Descartes,’ Dialogue 27 [1988], p. 24). As I shall show later, I take Descartes to be suggesting that it is through reflection on sense-perceptions, rather than on itself, that the mind discovers the innate idea of extension; nonetheless, I share Miles’ desire for a more unified account of Cartesian innate ideas.

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. . . nam quòd intelligam quid sit res, quid sit veritas, quid sit cogitatio, haec non aliunde habere videor quàm ab ipsâmet meâ naturâ. CSM translate this as ‘My understanding of what a thing is, what truth is, and what thought is, seems to derive simply from my own nature’ (CSM II 26), but there is actually no word in the Latin corresponding to ‘derive.’ My reading thus differs from that of Kenneth Winkler, who argues that the Meditations moves from a narrower to a wider sense of ‘my nature’ (and thus that ‘innate’ can apply to wider or narrower classes of ideas, depending on how widely or narrowly we take ‘my nature’). He writes, ‘On its narrowest interpretation, my nature is my essence,’ that is, being a thinking thing (Kenneth P. Winkler, ‘Grades of Cartesian Innateness,’ British Journal of the History of Philosophy 1, no. 2 [1993]: 27). On the other hand, in the Sixth Meditation the meditator says that by ‘my

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nature,’ he means ‘nothing other than the totality of things bestowed on me by God,’ and this includes being united to a body (ibid.). Winkler is surely right that in the Sixth Meditation the meditator expands the sense of ‘my nature’ in this way. In fact, just a little later, in a passage to which Winkler does not refer, the meditator seems to summarize these various senses of ‘my nature.’ Saying that he must ‘define exactly what I mean when I say that I am taught something by nature,’ Descartes writes: In this context I am taking nature to be something more limited than the totality of things bestowed on me by God. For this includes many things that belong to the mind alone—for example my perception that what is done cannot be undone, and all other things that are known by the natural light; but at this stage I am not speaking of these matters. It also includes much that relates to the body alone, like the tendency to move in a downward direction; but I am not speaking of these matters either. My sole concern here is with what God has bestowed on me as a combination of mind and body. (CSM II 57/AT VII 82)

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Descartes then goes on to say that ‘this nature [haec natura]’ has taught him to avoid pain and pursue pleasure; his use of the phrase ‘this nature’ suggests that the other things that God has bestowed on us can also be called ‘nature.’ In other words, there is a sense of ‘nature’ which means the human being as a combination of a body with a mind, another sense which includes only what pertains to our minds alone, and a third sense that includes only what pertains to our bodies. I would argue that by ‘things that belong to the mind alone,’ the meditator means perceptions that we have entirely as a result of the mind, with no dependence (either real or apparent) on external objects. ‘My nature’ in this sense thus includes only pure intellection, and not sense-perception or imagination. But ‘my nature’ in the wider sense, the sense which includes ‘what God has bestowed on me as a combination of mind and body,’ can include sense-perception and imagination, as well as pure intellect. This account of sense-perception is mechanistic to the extent that the body is involved. The actual sense-perception is of course an idea (a mode of mind), and thus cannot be mechanistically explained. The question of whether we should read Descartes as holding that senseperceptions are occasioned or caused is beyond the scope of this book. However, my reading of Cartesian innate ideas does not require that this issue be settled one way or the other. I believe that Descartes would also consider hallucinations to be adventitious ideas. In such cases, ideas seem to come from external objects, but do not. Nonetheless, there is presumably a causal chain originating in the perceiver’s own body which is responsible for the movement of the pineal gland that causes or occasions the idea. Will is involved, too; the point here is simply that reflection is not an act of imagination or sensation. I provide further argument for this claim in Chapter 6. Compare Descartes’ letter to Mersenne of 16 June 1641 (CSMK III 183–4/AT III 383).

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See William Henry Beardsley, III, ‘Descartes’ Theory of Imagination’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1984). I take it that these are equivalent. I am assuming that if our idea of supreme benevolence is innate, then so is our idea of supreme malice. In the Rules, Descartes says that we should count ‘privations and negations’ among the ‘simple natures,’ and the simple natures of the Rules are things that, in his later works, he says are known innately. Of course, we will not know in advance which innate idea we will perceive once we resolve to attend to our thoughts with the pure intellect; but we will nonetheless expect to perceive some innate ideas. Perhaps the earliest such interpretation was during Descartes’ own lifetime: in the 1649 Conversation with Burman, Burman attributes that view to Descartes. Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (n. p., 1968; reprint, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), p. 104. Vere Chappell has pointed out the striking fact that when Descartes speaks of ideas as dispositions, faculties, or capacities, he is always speaking about innate ideas (Chappell, ‘Theory of Ideas,’ p. 179). See also Rule Twelve of the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, where Descartes says that there are four faculties [facultates]: intellect, imagination, sense-perception, and memory (CSM I 39/AT X 411). Winkler, ‘Grades of Cartesian Innateness,’ p. 30. Ibid., pp. 29–30. It should be noted that Winkler’s suggestion is only tentative, for, as he notes, ‘in Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, Descartes does not explicitly apply this understanding of my nature’ (Ibid., p. 31). Tad Schmaltz, ‘Descartes on Innate Ideas, Sensation, and Scholasticism: The Response to Regius,’ in Studies in Seventeenth-Century European Philosophy, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), p. 40. Ibid. My thanks to Stephen Engstrom for pointing this out. The CSM translation renders this as ‘cases where my apprehension is more confused and obscure’ (CSM II 43). Again, the CSM translation (CSM II 45) does not indicate that Descartes uses adverbs here. For more examples of adverbial uses, see the Second Set of Replies (CSM II 116/AT VII 164 and CSM II 119/AT VII 169–70). Alan Gewirth, ‘Clearness and Distinctness in Descartes,’ in Descartes: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Willis Doney (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), pp. 256–7. It should be noted that Gewirth does not distinguish between ideas in the objective sense and ideas in the material sense. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., pp. 257–8. Ibid., p. 266. Evidence for this is that Descartes occasionally uses comparative and superlative forms of ‘clear and distinct.’ For example, in the Third Meditation he says, ‘The longer and more carefully I examine all these points, the more clearly and distinctly [tantò clarius & distinctius] I recognize their truth’ (CSM II 29/

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AT VII 42). In the Second Set of Replies, he speaks of ‘our clearest and most careful judgements [maxime claris & accuratis nostris judiciis]’ (CSM II 102/ AT VII 143). Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking, trans. and ed. by Jill Vance Buroker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 48. This is not to say that a maximally distinct perception must contain all the contents that the nature itself contains. If it did, it would be what Descartes calls an ‘adequate’ perception. But Descartes says that although we can have a clear and distinct perception of God, that perception is ‘in no way adequate’ (CSM II 108/AT VII 152). Thus when I say that a maximally distinct perception will include as many of the contents as possible, I mean that it will contain as many as it is humanly possible to perceive. Gewirth, ‘Clearness and Distinctness,’ pp. 257–8. Cited in ibid., p. 257. As we shall see in Chapter 6, this ‘noticing’ occurs through reflecting on or attending to the idea of a triangle. Again, by ‘all’ the contents, I mean as many contents as it is humanly possible to perceive. Chambers Murray Latin–English Dictionary. See, for example, the Fifth Meditation (CSM II 45/AT VII 65) and the First Set of Replies (CSM II 83/AT VII 115–6). Descartes says something similar in Definition IX of the Second Set of Replies: ‘When we say that something is contained in the nature or concept of a thing [in alicujus rei naturâ sive conceptu contineri], this is the same as saying that it is true of that thing, or that it can be asserted of that thing’ (CSM II 114/AT VII 162; translators’ italics). By ‘concepts’ he must mean ideas in the objective sense rather than ideas in the material sense; for surely, since our perceptions can be obscure and confused, he does not want to say that whatever is contained in any perception we have of a thing is true of that thing. Descartes says in the Rules that ‘we are mistaken if we ever judge that we lack complete knowledge of any one of these simple natures’ (CSM I 45/AT X 420). Of course, I suggested in Chapter 1 that Descartes had not yet worked out his conception of ideas when he was writing the Rules. Nonetheless, interpreting this passage in light of his later distinctions, we could say that while human thinkers have ideas in the objective sense of all simple natures, they do not necessarily recognize that they have this ‘knowledge’ (which is really a kind of implicit knowledge; see Chapter 3). Thus Descartes could say simultaneously that we have complete knowledge of the simples and that our perceptions of those ideas can be confused.

Chapter 3 1

Robert McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ in Cartesian Studies, ed. R. J. Butler (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1972), pp. 32–54. See also Robert McRae, ‘Descartes’ Definition of Thought,’ in Cartesian Studies, ed. R. J. Butler (New York: Barnes & Noble,

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1972), pp. 55–70. As will become clear, I think McRae is certainly pointing us in the right direction, but I disagree with some of the details of his account. In Chapter 5, I will suggest that, if one’s understanding of these concepts were expressed as propositions, Descartes would be willing to characterize these propositions as known by the natural light. McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ p. 34. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 39. Such definitions, he thinks, distract us from real understanding (The Search for Truth, CSM II 417/AT X 523). Writing in the Rules of the ‘purely intellectual simple natures’ such as thought and existence, Descartes says that ‘we have real knowledge [cognoscimus] of all of these, knowledge so easy that in order to possess it all we need is some degree of rationality’ (CSM I 44–5/AT X 419). Daisie Radner and Michael Radner, Animal Consciousness (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1989), pp. 26–31. Ibid., p. 30. Antoine Arnauld, On True and False Ideas, New Objections to Descartes’ Meditations, and Descartes’ Replies, trans. Elmar J. Kremer (Lampeter, Wales: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), pp. 25–6. The words cognitio and cognosco are not to be associated only with this kind of knowledge-by-acquaintance, however. When Descartes uses the word cognitio in this connection, he qualifies it with the word interna. In a discussion of memory in a 1648 letter to Arnauld, Descartes compares a child’s ‘direct’ thoughts—which are sensations—with the reflective thought [reflexio] which occurs ‘when an adult feels something, and simultaneously perceives that he has not felt it before’ (CSMK III 357/AT V 220–1). It may seem that the ‘reflection’ Descartes describes here is in fact what he elsewhere would describe as the state of being conscius, but I do not think that this is so, for two reasons. First, Descartes emphasizes in this passage that this reflection ‘appears to be indistinguishable’ from the sensation, implying that in fact it is distinguishable. Conscientia, however, does not involve a distinct act of thought. Second, conscientia is typically an awareness of the thought itself, not a perception that the thought is a new one. If I know that I know what thought is, I must therefore explicitly know what thought is. On the other hand, just because I explicitly know what thought is does not mean that I explicitly know that I know—although I implicitly know that I know, since implicit awareness accompanies every thought. For example, in the passage cited earlier, McRae says that ‘Certain universal concepts such as “thought,” “existence,” “thing,” “substance,” “duration,” “number,” and the universal principle “He who thinks exists,” are all capable of being derived by intuitive induction from my experience or consciousness of any individual act of thinking’ (‘Innate Ideas,’ p. 41). But when McRae considers Descartes’ Third Meditation claim that ‘My understanding of what a thing is, what truth is, and what thought is, seems to derive simply from my own nature’ (CSM II 26/AT VII 38), he reads the meditator as claiming that he has discovered

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those ideas ‘wholly from reflection on the cogito ergo sum,’ by which he means ‘the indubitable statement, I am a thinking thing’ (Ibid., p. 35). This may well be McRae’s position, too. If so, that would explain the ambiguity in his article. Descartes occasionally suggests that we make our ideas clear and distinct by attending to the natures themselves. For example, in the Second Set of Replies he says that ‘No one can possibly go wrong when he tries to form a correct conception of the idea of God, provided he is willing to attend to the nature of a supremely perfect God’ (CSM II 99/AT VII 138). And one of the truths that Descartes says are known by the natural light is said to be grasped through attention to the nature of time (CSM II 33/AT VII 49). But since he holds that ideas in the objective sense just are natures as they exist in the mind, this can be taken as meaning that we should attend to our ideas in the objective sense. McRae also suggests that the process of making our ideas clear and distinct is the same process by which we discover our innate ideas (McRae, ‘Descartes’ Definition of Thought,’ p. 68). However, McRae does not pursue the thought and thus offers very little in the way of detail or argument. I think McRae’s claim that attention is sufficient for clear and distinct perception is right, but I think the process is more complex than McRae suggests. The first case describes imagination, which involves attending to impressions created in the brain. The second case describes focusing attention on some external object; this presumably includes both will-directed sensation, when we choose to attend to some object currently present to the senses, and memory and imagination, when we attend to images traced and stored in the brain. Descartes emphasizes that this natural arrangement can differ from person to person; a perception which is naturally linked with the passion of fear in one person might not be so linked in some other person. This is due, he says, to brain differences (CSM I 343/AT XI 358). He also allows that natural arrangements can be changed through habit (CSM I 348/AT XI 369–70). Although none of the thoughts in this class are caused by movements of the pineal gland, Descartes would not hold that none of them have effects on the pineal gland. Thoughts of purely intelligible things have no effect on the pineal gland; however, imagining a non-existent thing has some effect, insofar as such imagining involves combining images already stored in the corporeal imagination, thus producing new traces and impressions in that part of the brain which Descartes thinks comprises the corporeal imagination. He writes that ‘perceptions can be changed by the soul only indirectly, except when it is itself their cause’ (CSM I 343/AT XI 359–60; my emphasis). The ideas he has formed through meditating are, I would argue, perceptions of his innate ideaso. I take it that Descartes thinks that memories and daydreams, which might also pop into one’s mind, are composed of ideas which ultimately derive from adventitious ideas. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae ([Cambridge, Eng.]: Blackfriars, 1964–), 1a q.79 a.4. McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ p. 35.

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Ibid. Ibid. Notice that he only begins to develop this understanding. Descartes would say, I think, that the notion of truth (indeed, any notion) contains much more than one can take in in a single act of attention. As he says in the Rules, I can have knowledge of a triangle, even though it has never occurred to me that this knowledge involves knowledge also of the angle, the line, the number three, shape, extension, etc. . . . Perhaps there are many additional natures implicitly contained in the triangle which escape our notice, such as the size of the angles being equal to two right angles, the innumerable relations between the sides and the angles, the size of the surface area, etc. (CSM I 46/AT X 422)

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Other natures, too, have ‘innumerable’ implicit contents, which will only gradually be explicated. That is, things he perceives clearly and distinctly can be known to be true at the time that he perceives them; the meditator does not establish that such things can always be known to be true until the Fifth Meditation. Cited in McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ p. 34. Descartes does not think that the substances of thought and extension can exist independently of God, but he frequently speaks as if this goes without saying. Compare Descartes’ remark in the Conversation with Burman, that before we can know ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist,’ ‘the major “whatever thinks exists” can be known; for it is in reality prior to my inference, and my inference depends on it. That is why the author says in the Principles that the major premiss comes first, namely because implicitly it is always presupposed and prior [implicite semper praesupponitur et praecedit]’ (CSMK III 333/AT V 147). Descartes does give some synthetic demonstrations in the Second Set of Replies, but a demonstration of the cogito is not among them. Thus Descartes describes analysis as a method of discovery, and synthesis as a ‘follow-up’ to analysis (CSM II 110–1/AT VII 155–6). The French translation includes the additional characteristic, ‘immuable’ (AT IX 32). See CSM II 96/AT VII 133, where he speaks of the ‘facultas ideam istam formandi.’ At CSMK III 147/AT III 64 he cites approvingly Regius’ statement that ‘it is because we have in ourselves some wisdom, power [potentia] and goodness that we form the idea of an infinite, or at least indefinite, wisdom, power, goodness and the other perfections which we attribute to God.’ Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 285, n. 37. One might worry that these claims conflict with the meditator’s remark in the Third Meditation that it is not the case that ‘my perception of the infinite is arrived at not by means of a true idea but merely by negating the finite’ (CSM II 31/AT VII 45). But evidently Descartes does not think that indefinitely extending finite ideas is the same as negating those ideas. Menn, Descartes and Augustine, p. 284.

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Descartes proves the existence of God by arguing that his idea of God possesses more objective reality than he himself could confer on an idea, and thus that there must be a God who causes him to have that idea. Cited in Jean-Marie Beyssade, ‘The Idea of God and Proofs of His Existence,’ trans. John Cottingham, in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 174. Ibid., p. 179. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 180. Ibid. In fact, I have a few other complaints about Beyssade’s reading, but they are less related to his central claim about the role of the proofs for the existence of God. One problem is his claim that ‘the idea of perfection’ is ‘found, conceived and recognized prior to, and independently of, any human aspiration’ (ibid., p. 181). By ‘human aspiration,’ Beyssade evidently means both the recognition that one is limited in relation to something else and the resulting desire to be more like the unlimited thing. But, in fact, we have seen that although Descartes does indeed think that the idea of perfection exists prior to ‘human aspiration,’ he does not think it is ‘conceived and recognized’ prior to that aspiration. It is the aspiration itself, the recognition of one’s limitations, which leads one to explicitly recognize that one has an idea of something unlimited. Another problem is that Beyssade mischaracterizes Cartesian innateness. He remarks that the innate idea of the unity of all the perfections, ‘like every innate idea, is not so much an actually present idea as a power or faculty for producing the idea’ (ibid., pp. 181–2). But this is a false dichotomy: as I have argued, innate ideas are both actually-present ideas and powers or faculties for producing ideas. In their former incarnation, they are ideas in the objective sense; in the latter, they are ideas as dispositions. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., pp. 184–5.

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For example, two well-known expositions of the Meditations, those by Margaret Wilson and Bernard Williams, give the natural light only passing mention. A 2005 article by Samuel Rickliss explicates the natural light in order to defend Descartes against the charge of circularity. Rickliss concludes, as I do below, that the natural light is to be associated with the faculty of the understanding, although I also make the case that this faculty is, for Descartes, inextricably linked with the will (Samuel Rickliss, ‘The Cartesian Fallacy Fallacy,’ Noûs 39, no. 2 (2005): 309–36). See, for example, Koyré, Essai sur l’Idée de Dieu et les Preuves de son Existence chez Descartes (Paris: Editions Ernest Leroux, 1922; reprint, New York: Garland, 1987), p. 210.

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John Morris, ‘Descartes’ Natural Light,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 11, no. 2 (1973): 169–87, reprinted in Eternal Truths and the Cartesian Circle: A Collection of Studies, ed. Willis Doney (New York: Garland, 1987), pp. 163–81. All references to ‘Descartes’ Natural Light’ give the original pagination. ‘It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same time; What is done cannot be undone; He who thinks cannot but exist while he thinks.’ The first and the fourth of the ten axioms on the list match naturally lit truths explicitly described as such in the Meditations and Replies. Others match statements made in the Third Meditation which are not said there to be naturally lit truths; however, Axiom III (‘It is impossible that nothing, a non-existing thing, should be the cause of the existence of anything, or of an actual perfection in anything’ [CSM II 116/AT VII 165; see also CSM II 97/AT VII 135]) resembles one of the two claims said to ‘follow from’ a naturally lit truth in the Third Meditation (‘something cannot arise from nothing’ [CSM II 28/AT VII 40]). Likewise, Axiom II (‘There is no relation of dependence between the present time and the immediately preceding time, and hence no less a cause is required to preserve something than is required to create it in the first place’ [CSM II 116/AT VII 165]) seems similar to a claim said, right before the naturally lit truth concerning creation and preservation, to be perspicuum (‘that the same power and action are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment of its duration as would be required to create that thing anew . . . ‘ [CSM II 33/AT VII 49]). And Axiom VII, which says that a thinking being will give itself whatever perfections it finds itself to lack, assuming it has the power to do so, resembles Descartes’ claim in the Fourth Set of Replies that he perceives by the natural light ‘that I would have given myself all the perfections of which I have an idea, if I had given myself existence’ (CSM II 167/AT VII 240). John Morris makes the same claim in ‘Descartes’ Natural Light,’ p. 169. This does seem to be true of Axiom III (‘It is impossible that nothing, a non-existing thing, should be the cause of anything, or of any actual perfection in anything’ [CSM II 116/AT VII 165]), which is similar to a Third Meditation claim said only to ‘follow from’ a naturally lit truth (CSM II 28/AT VII 40); Axiom III, in other words, seems deducible from another truth, and thus should be called a theorem rather than an axiom. But the Third Meditation claim which is similar to Axiom II (concerning the difference between preservation and creation) is treated as a premise from which a truth said to be known by the natural light is inferred (CSM II 33/AT VII 49), which rather suggests that the Third Meditation naturally lit truth is really a theorem and should be explained in terms of the axiom. The claim that ‘Nothing comes from nothing’ is said elsewhere in the Principles to be ‘very evident by the natural light’ (CSM I 199/AT VIIIA 11–12), and it is also said to be so known in the Meditations. Likewise, ‘He who thinks cannot but exist while he thinks’ is said to be known by the natural light in the Meditations. Anthony Kenny, Descartes (n. p., 1968; reprint, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), p. 176; Morris, ‘Descartes’ Natural Light,’ p. 179. Norman Kemp Smith, New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes: Descartes as Pioneer (London: Macmillan & Co., 1952), p. 74. John Morris, ‘Cartesian Certainty,’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 47, no. 2 (August 1969), p. 166.

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Peter A. Schouls, ‘Cartesian Certainty and the “Natural Light,”’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 48, no. 1 (May 1970), pp. 116–7. Peter A. Schouls, ‘Descartes and the Autonomy of Reason,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 10, no. 3 (July 1972), p. 309. Kenny, Descartes, p. 176. In a 1641 letter to Mersenne, Descartes himself characterizes the propositions perceived by the natural light as ‘speculative truths’; he refers to ‘speculativas tantum & solius luminis naturalis ope cognitas veritates’ (CSMK III 175/AT III 335). Morris, ‘Descartes’ Natural Light,’ p. 174. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 174. The passage Morris points to is at CSM I 42/AT X 415. John Morris, ‘Raison, Connaissance and Conception in Descartes’ Méditations,’ Sophia 36, no. 3–4 (1968), p. 268. Morris, ‘Descartes’ Natural Light,’ pp. 174–5, and ‘Raison,’ p. 268. Morris, ‘Raison,’ p. 269. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 269–70. Morris maintains elsewhere that we should take the Latin terms cognitio and cognoscere in the same way, as ‘recognition’ and ‘to recognize’ (Morris, ‘Types of Certainty in the Foundations of the Sciences in the Philosophy of René Descartes’ [Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1968], p. 25). It should be noted that Morris has modernized the French. I have chosen to retain the original spelling. Morris, ‘Raison,’ pp. 270–1. Ibid., p. 271. Morris, ‘Descartes’ Natural Light,’ p. 175, n. 24. Morris, ‘Raison,’ p. 271. This type of reading has a precedent in the works of Aquinas. Anthony Kenny has pointed out that Aquinas uses the word intellectus in both a narrow sense, to characterize the ability to grasp first principles, where it contrasts with discursive reasoning [ratio], and in a broader sense to describe the mind in general, which includes both ratio and intellectus in the narrow sense. Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 55–6. Descartes occasionally seems to use the word intellectio to refer to intellect in the strict, narrow sense, where this consists simply in the passive perception of ideas. He states explicitly in his letters to Regius that intellectio is a passive operation of the mind, which contrasts with the active volitio (CSMK III 182/AT III 372). In the Meditations, intellectio first appears in the Sixth Meditation, where the meditator uses it to refer to the perception of an idea (CSM II 50/AT VII 72 and CSM II 51/AT VII 73). Writing later of imagination and sensory perception, the meditator states that ‘intellectionem enim nonnullam in suo formali conceptu includunt’ (CSM II 54/AT VII 78). The CSM translation of this passage represents Descartes as claiming that imagination and sensory perception include in their definition ‘an intellectual act,’ suggesting that intellectio is active. The Latin, however, contains no reference to an ‘act’; a better translation would be ‘they include in their formal definition some intellection.’ Think back to the meditator’s account in the Second Meditation of how imagination and sensation can be considered to belong to the meditator even though he is not yet certain that he has a body. The

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power of imagination can operate even if the objects of imagination do not exist, since it consists in ‘simply contemplating the shape or image of a corporeal thing’ (CSM II 19/AT VII 28). And in the ‘restricted sense of the term,’ he says, sensory perception is simply seeming to see, hear, feel, and so on’ (CSM II 19/AT VII 29). In other words, the most fundamental feature of these faculties is the perception of ideas. By intellectio, then, Descartes seems to mean the perception of ideas in the intellect. And, again, we know from The Passions of the Soul and the letters to Regius that such perception is passive. Intellectio thus seems to be a special term for the narrow sense of intellectus, the operation of the intellect entirely on its own, without any influences from the senses and without any reliance on the will. Morris, ‘Descartes’ Natural Light,’ p. 175. In fact, Morris’ reliance on the French translation of the Meditations seems to have led him to overlook a clear counter-example, by his own lights, to his assertion that the natural light must be taken to be passive. In the Fourth Set of Replies, Descartes twice uses the phrase lumine naturali percipimus (CSM 168/AT 241). If we follow Morris’ injunction to read forms of percipere as ‘conceive,’ in an active sense, and we assume with Morris that the activity or passivity of the natural light can be inferred from the verb with which it is used, then the natural light would seem to be an active faculty. Since I have argued against Morris’ claim that percipere is active, however, these passages do not pose this problem for my interpretation of the natural light. See AT IX 39 (CSM II 33/AT VII 49), IX 41 (CSM II 35/AT VII 52), and IX 47 (CSM II 41/AT VII 60). Margaret Dauler Wilson, Descartes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978; reprint, London: Routledge, 1993), p. 179. Rickliss reaches the same conclusion (Rickliss, ‘The Cartesian Fallacy Fallacy,’ pp. 314–18). To use the natural light properly thus requires that we free our minds completely from the influence of the senses and from ‘preconceived opinions.’ As Descartes puts it, ‘sensory appearances generally interfere with [the intellectual vision which nature gave us] and darken it to a very great extent’ (CSM II 115/AT VII 162–3). This need to free the mind from the senses is a theme that runs throughout Descartes’ work. (For examples in the Meditations, see CSM II 5/AT VII 4; CSM II 8/AT VII 9; CSM II 9/AT VII 12; CSM II 47/AT VII 69; and CSM II 94/AT VII 130–1). See his letter to Regius of May 1641 (CSMK III 182/AT III 372); the letter to Regius of December 1641 (CSMK III 199/AT III 455); and the Passions of the Soul (CSM I 335/AT XI 342). See Principles of Philosophy I 23 (CSM I 201/AT VIIIA 14) and Descartes’ 1630 letter to Mersenne, where he writes that ‘In God willing and knowing are a single thing’ (CSMK III 24/AT I 149). Aquinas writes that ‘the intellect understands that the will wills, and the will wills the intellect to understand’ (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae [(Cambridge, Eng.): Blackfriars, 1964–], 1a q.82 a.4). Eustachius a Sancto Paulo also says in his 1609 Compendium that ‘it belongs to the will to move other faculties of the soul, including the intellect, to their respective acts’ (Roger Ariew, John Cottingham,

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and Tom Sorell, Descartes’ Meditations: Background Source Materials [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], p. 79). See Passions of the Soul II 76 (CSM I 355/AT XI 383). My account of Aquinas’ view of the will follows Eleonore Stump, ‘Aquinas’s Account of Freedom: Intellect and Will,’ The Monist 80, no. 4 (1997): 576–97. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a q.82, a1. Stump, ‘Aquinas’s Account of Freedom,’ p. 579. Ibid., p. 580. Ibid., p. 590. Ibid. Stump cites De Veritate q.22 a.5, in which Aquinas writes, ‘libertas, secundum Augustinum, opponitur necessitati coactionis, non autem naturalis inclinationis,’ ‘Following Augustine, liberty is opposed to the necessity of coercion, but not to natural inclination’ (my translation). See the Second Set of Replies, where he says that ‘as soon as we think that we correctly perceive something, we are spontaneously convinced [sponte nobis persuademus] that it is true’ (CSM II 103/AT VII 144). Morris, ‘Descartes’ Natural Light,’ p. 175. I am indebted to Jill Vance Buroker for stressing this point. See Descartes’ Conversation with Burman, where he says that ‘the author is considering at this point [i.e., in the First Meditation] the man who is only just beginning to philosophize’ (CSM III 332/AT V 146). Plato, Republic, translated by G. M. A. Grube and revised by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 508b–c. John I: 9. See Augustine, Of True Religion, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, trans. John H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), p. 262 and p. 266. Augustine says in On the Trinity, for example, that the mind is wise ‘not by its own light, but by a participation in that highest light’ (Augustine, On the Trinity, ed. Gareth B. Matthews [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], p. 154). Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, 1a q.85 a.1. Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, p. 52. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, 1a q.79 a.6. Aquinas describes this process in Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 1: God, translated by Anton C. Pegis (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955; reprint, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), p. 188. See also Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a q.84. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae q.171 a.2. See also Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 3 Part 1, Providence, translated by Vernon J. Bourke (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1956; reprint, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), p. 155, where he refers to the lumen intellectus agentis. See also the Conversation with Burman, where Descartes says that ‘we do not separate out these general propositions from the particular instances; rather, it is in the particular instances that we think of them’ (CSMK III 333/AT V 147). Likewise, in the Appendix to the Fifth Set of Replies, Descartes writes that ‘if we are to discover the truth we must always begin with particular notions in order to arrive at general ones later on’ (CSM II 271/AT VII 206). David C. Lindberg, ‘The Science of Optics,’ in Science in the Middles Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 356–7. Robert

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Grosseteste, first chancellor of Oxford University, who wrote extensively on light, also distinguished between lux and lumen, although the distinction for him was between the original created light (lux) and reflected light (lumen). See Armand A. Maurer, Medieval Philosophy, 2nd edn. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982), pp. 122–3. This is slightly misleading, however, because Avicenna also distinguishes lightrays from both lux and lumen; the ray was the course which the lumen followed. In the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes uses a form of ‘lux’ when he refers to the rationis luce, which he evidently considers equivalent to the rationis lumini. Cottingham, Stoothoff and Murdoch translate both as ‘the light of reason’ (CSM I 14/AT X 368). More often in this work, though, Descartes refers to naturale lumen (natural light) and naturali rationis lumine (the natural light of reason).

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This reading of the natural light was initially suggested by Annette Baier in some unpublished notes, although my interpretation differs from hers in various ways. In her unpublished notes, ‘One Way to Deal with One Worry about the Third Meditation,’ Baier proposes that the truths perceived by the natural light are learned from particular instances of those truths which occur in our mental experience. Baier thus suggests that, in the Meditations, the truths perceived by the natural light have been exemplified in the meditator’s thoughts. My account differs from hers in several ways, however. First, to make sense of Descartes’ suggestion that truths are perceived by the natural light through attending to concepts, I will argue that attending to concepts means attending to how those concepts have been relied on in thought. I also locate the implicit reliance on the various truths in different parts of the Meditations than Baier does. Finally, I see this account of the natural light as fitting within an interpretation of Cartesian innate ideas in general and how they are perceived, which is no part of Baier’s account. In another remark, from the First Set of Replies, Descartes says that ‘the natural light does not establish that the concept of an efficient cause requires that it be prior in time to its effect. . . . However, the natural light does establish that if anything exists we may always ask why it exists’ (CSM II 78/AT VII 108). Although his claim here is a negative one—that examination of the concept of ‘cause’ does not reveal that an efficient cause must be prior in time—the suggestion is nonetheless that perception by the natural light involves examination of a concept. Descartes, after all, felt that such definitions do not advance knowledge. Compare this passage from the Third Meditation with a remark Descartes makes in a 1639 letter to Mersenne, where he says that humans have two kinds of ‘instinct [instincs]’: ‘One is in us qua human beings, and is purely intellectual: it is the natural light or mental vision [la lumiere naturelle ou intuitus mentis]. This is the only instinct which I think one should trust. The other belongs to us qua animals, and is a certain impulse of nature towards the preservation of our body, towards the enjoyment of bodily pleasures, and so on. This should not always be followed’ (CSMK III 140/AT II 599).

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Jean-Marie Beyssade, ‘The Idea of God and Proofs of His Existence,’ trans. John Cottingham, in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 185.

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McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ in Cartesian Studies, ed. R. J. Butler (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1972), pp. 46–7. Other arguments against McRae’s claim that the idea of extension is adventitious appear in Murray Miles, ‘The Idea of Extension: Innate or Adventitious? On R. F. McRae’s Interpretation of Descartes,’ Dialogue 27 (1988), pp. 15–24; Murray Miles, ‘McRae on Innate Ideas: A Rejoinder,’ Dialogue 27 (1988), pp. 29–30; and Margaret Dauler Wilson, Descartes (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 169. McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ pp. 45–6. McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ p. 43. Margaret Wilson has also pointed this out. Wilson, Descartes, p. 240, n. 7. McRae, ‘Innate Ideas,’ pp. 43–4. See Principles I 48 (CSM I 208–9/AT VIIIA 23), I 53 (CSM I 210–1/AT VIIIA 25), and I 65 (CSM I 216/AT VIIIA 32). The account of how we come to have innate ideas that I will ultimately endorse does, in fact, give a certain limited role to sensation. In a sense, McRae is on the right track when he points out that the acquisition of the idea of extension involves sensation to some extent. However, because he reads ‘innate’ as involving no use of the senses, he is forced to conclude that the idea of extension is not innate. Lesley Beck, The Metaphysics of Descartes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 156. John Carriero, ‘The First Meditation,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1987), p. 228 and p. 245, n. 7. I would point out that the passage Carriero cites claims only that one can dream up shapes which one has never experienced, and not that one could explicitly possess the idea of extension without any sensory experience. But I will have more to say about this in what follows. It should be noted that there is no conflict here with Descartes’ thesis that innate ideas are those that seem to derive from our nature alone, for although senseperception and imagination play an auxiliary role in our perception of these particular innate ideas, the ideas do not actually seem to come from anything but our nature itself. Reflecting on the wax, which the meditator perceives through sensation, does not presuppose that the meditator knows that anything exists, for he remarks that there is a restricted notion of sense-perception in which sensory perception consists simply in seeming to see, hear, etc. (CSM II 19/AT VII 29). Descartes describes a similar procedure in Principles II 11, in a passage arguing that the idea of space is the same as the idea of corporeal substance. Again emphasizing the importance of attending to our sense-perceptions, he writes: Suppose we attend [attendentes] to the idea we have of some body, for example a stone, and leave out everything we know to be non-essential to the nature of body: We will first of all exclude hardness, since if the stone

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Descartes generally refrains from making claims about angelic minds, telling Henry More that ‘it is not clear by natural reason alone whether angels are created like minds distinct from bodies, or like minds united to bodies’ (CSMK III 380/AT V 402). The Thomistic tradition endorsed the former view; if Descartes accepted this view, he would have held that angels’ minds, like ours, are stocked with innate ideas in the objective sense, but that, unlike us, they actually perceive all those ideas. It should be noted that by ‘mental image’ here I do not mean anything corporeal, but a mode of mind. In his questions concerning this passage, Burman framed the discussion in terms of ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ triangles (CSMK III 344/AT V 162). Since Descartes did not correct him, I conclude that Descartes was happy to interpret the ‘true’ triangle as the ‘perfect’ triangle, and drawn triangles as ‘imperfect’ triangles. (I discuss Burman’s objections later in this chapter.) My thanks to Joseph Camp for pointing out this disanalogy. Frederick P. Van De Pitte, ‘Descartes’ Innate Ideas,’ Kant-Studien 76 (1985), p. 368. Van De Pitte goes on to conclude that ‘the idea of a triangle is only there if the powers of the mind are employed to formulate it.’ As should be clear from my discussion above, I do not think his conclusion goes far enough. There is one curious disanalogy, however. While the artist’s idea of the statue of Mercury is distinct from the actual statue which is produced, the idea of the true triangle which makes the eliciting possible is also the very thing which is elicited. The Latin is ‘extensum quid, flexibile, mutabile.’ In the Principles, Descartes says that motion is a mode of matter, that is, a feature which God conferred on matter upon creating it (CSM I 240/AT VIIIA 61; see also The World, CSM I 91/AT XI 34). In other words, matter is not essentially moving; it is, rather, essentially moveable. Flexibility and mutability, then, refer to the moveability of extended substance. More specifically, in saying that extension is ‘flexible,’ Descartes seems to mean that extension (or, rather, particular parts of it) can change shape or size. Mutability, on the other hand, seems to refer to change in place; this is how he uses the word mutare in the Principles (CSM I 228–9/AT VIIIA 47– 8). It is thus a broader notion than flexibility, since changes in the shape or size of some extended thing are explained by the changes in place of smaller components of that thing; that is, flexibility is explained by the mutability of a thing’s parts.

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See also Principles I 65, where Descartes says that ‘there are various modes of extension, or modes which belong to extension, such as all shapes, the positions of parts and the motion of the parts’ (CSM I 216/AT VIIIA 32). In The World, Descartes says that ‘The idea of this matter is included to such an extent in all the ideas that our imagination can form that you must necessarily conceive it or else you can never imagine anything at all’ (CSM I 91–2/AT XI 35). Something like Aristotle’s distinction between first and second potentiality might be helpful to Descartes here. Of course, this does not mean one must be able to picture those shapes in the imagination; Descartes says of himself that because he is ‘a fairly imaginative man and has trained his mind in this field for some time, [he] can imagine these figures reasonably distinctly; but others lack this ability’ (CSMK III 345/AT V 163). In The Passions of the Soul, Descartes characterizes one group of volitions as those which ‘terminate in the soul itself, as when we will to love God, or generally speaking, to apply our mind to some object which is not material’ (CSM I 355/AT XI 343). I take this to mean that applying the mind to its own ideas involves a volition. That is, the Fifth Meditation (CSM II 44–45/AT VII 64) and the Fifth Replies (CSM II 262/AT VII 381–2). Plato, Phaedo, in Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 74d–e. Ibid., 74a. Ibid., 74b. CSMK III 222–3/AT VIIIB 167 and CSM II 44/AT VII 64. Again, commentators on Plato disagree about the role of sense-perception in Plato’s recollection doctrine; some have held that it is necessary, others that it is not. But for my purposes we need not settle on any particular interpretation of the Platonic doctrine. What is important is just that one interpretation of this passage in the Meno suggests a role for sense-perception which Descartes himself might have adopted. Plato, Phaedo, 100d. Plato, Meno, in Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 82b–85c. It is interesting that although Descartes claims that the geometrical truths that he knows about triangles are derived simply from the nature or idea of a triangle, the Euclidean demonstrations in fact require more than just that. In this case the drawing-forth is from an idea rather than from the mind, but since ideas are modes of mind, I do not think that affects the point. In her book Descartes, Margaret Wilson maintains that in answer to the question ‘Does our mathematical knowledge depend in any degree on our having a body (or does it rather derive directly from pure understanding)?’ Descartes would say ‘yes,’ for ‘our ability to develop a systematic science of body is not presented as independent of our ability to form corporeal images. . . . Doubtless imagination is only an aid, which helps us understand or grasp truths about immaterial entities (the ‘immutable natures’) by presenting to our mental vision some kind of physical exemplar of these objects. Still, the prominence accorded the notion of imagination in Meditation V (and the beginning of Meditation VI) would suggest

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that it is far from being an incidental aid’ (Wilson, Descartes, pp. 170–1). Wilson does not explore the role the imagination might play, however. In his 1984 dissertation, William Beardsley argues (though for reasons different from the ones I will suggest) that imagination plays an essential role in Descartes’ account of our acquisition of mathematical truths. According to Beardsley, the role of the imagination is to provide a ‘correct image’ of some mathematical object which the intellect can turn to in its quest to discover all the features which the nature of that object necessarily contains (William Henry Beardsley III, ‘Descartes’ Theory of Imagination,’ Ph.D. dissertation [University of Pittsburgh, 1984], p. 70). For a helpful discussion of Descartes’ views regarding other appropriate uses of the imagination, see Desmond Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), pp. 81–93. See, for example, the last paragraph of the Third Meditation (CSM II 36/AT VII 52) and the opening paragraph of the Fourth (CSM II 36–7/AT VII 52–3). In the first passage, the meditator is pausing to ‘gaze with wonder and adoration on the beauty’ of God; in the second, he states that the existence of God is the most evident and certain thing that the ingenium can know. In both passages there is a contrast between the human mind and the divine mind. Thus it seems that ingenium refers particularly to the human mind—and the human mind includes not just pure intellect, but sense-perception and imagination as well. For a detailed account of the classical Latin and medieval meanings of ingenium, and of Descartes’ own usage of the word, see Dennis L. Sepper, Descartes’s Imagination: Proportion, Images, and the Activity of Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 83–99. Sepper argues that for Descartes, ‘Ingenium . . . is the native endowment of the human being who is composed of body and soul (thus it would not be relevant to the soul that has been liberated from the body after death)’ (p. 96). René Descartes, The Geometry of René Descartes, trans. David Eugene Smith and Marcia L. Latham (New York: Dover, 1954). Propositions 18 and 32 are theorems rather than construction problems. However, as Wilbur Knorr points out, this distinction is largely artificial, since any problem can be cast as a theorem, and any theorem can be rephrased as a problem. Wilbur Richard Knorr, The Ancient Tradition of Geometric Problems (Boston: Burkhäuser, 1986), p. 349. In what follows, I am indebted to Kenneth Manders. By ‘pure intellect,’ of course, I do not mean to exclude the use of the will. This is the thesis proposed by McRae. For example, she writes, ‘If implicit knowledge is what I have of my decisions, intentions, etc. when I’m not actually reflecting or focusing my attention on them, it is hardly what I, a non-mathematician, have of even the simplest Euclidean geometry—let alone the most “abstruse” ’ (Wilson, Descartes, p. 163). Descartes describes in the Discourse how, by practicing mathematics, his ‘mind gradually became accustomed to conceiving its objects more clearly and distinctly’ (CSM I 121/AT VI 21). Wilson, Descartes, p. 162. This truth could presumably be learned either through analysis or through synthesis. Suppose Descartes thinks it (and others like it) is learned through

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analysis. In that case, because analysis requires that the diagram be appropriately elaborated with auxiliary lines, the thinker would indeed need some prior knowledge of geometry; otherwise she would not know how to prepare the diagram. On the other hand, if Descartes thinks this proposition is learned through something like Euclid’s synthetic demonstrations, then clearly some prior familiarity with the definitions and postulates, and indeed with the results of various demonstrations, is necessary to see the truth of this proposition. For example, the proof that the three angles of a triangle equal two right angles, which appears as part of Euclid’s Proposition 32, invokes the results of the proof of Proposition 13, which itself relies upon the first two Euclidean common notions, that ‘Things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another,’ and that ‘If equals be added to equals, the wholes are equal.’ Similarly, Euclid’s demonstration of Proposition 18, that the greatest side of a triangle subtends its greatest angle, depends upon having established Proposition 3, which in turn depends upon the first common notion. Euclid himself uses the phrase ‘common notion’ rather than ‘axiom,’ and he distinguishes the common notions from the postulates. Proclus notes three ways in which geometers distinguish postulates from axioms: first, while both axioms and postulates are assumed as true, postulates require that we assume that something can be easily constructed, ‘while an axiom asserts some inherent attribute that is known at once to one’s auditors’; second, postulates are particular to geometry, while axioms are more general and can also be applied in other fields; third, at least according to Aristotle, a postulate can be proven, while an axiom cannot. Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, trans. Glenn R. Morrow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 140–3. In Heath’s translation of Euclid’s Elements this common notion appears as ‘Things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another’ (Euclid, The Thirteen Books of the Elements, trans. with commentary by Sir Thomas L. Heath, 2nd edn. [New York: Dover, 1956], p. 155). The Greek word isos can also be translated as ‘the same as.’ The third and fourth Euclidean common notions are: (3) If equals be subtracted from equals, the remainders are equal; (4) Things which coincide with one another are equal to one another (Ibid.). In the Sixth Meditation, he reports that in imagining a triangle, ‘I . . . see the three lines with my mind’s eye [acie mentis intueor]’ (CSM II 51/AVII 72). And in the Optics he emphasizes that images in the brain allow for sense-perception, though he also says that such images do not have to actually resemble the objects which cause them (CSM I 166/AT VI 113). For example, he says that ‘From God’s immutability we can also know certain rules or laws of nature’ (CSM I 240/AT VIIIA 62), and in each of the three laws of nature, he shows (albeit somewhat sketchily) how God’s immutability is supposed to help establish the law. On the first law, see CSM I/AT VIIIA 62; on the second law, CSM I 242/AT VIIIA 63–4; on the third law, CSM I 243/AT VIIIA 66). For a helpful discussion of these passages, see Daniel Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 280–93.

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Index

abstraction 66, 102 action 86–94, 96, 100, 103 adventitious ideas 12, 28–9, 31–2, 38–45, 62–4, 75, 145 see also sense-perception Alanen, Lilli 12 analysis 124, 146 see also method, analytic anamnesis see recollection account Aquinas 66, 94–5, 101–2, 131 Aristotle 57, 66 arithmetic see mathematics Arnauld, Antoine 49, 58 attention 39, 50, 57–67, 69–70, 72, 106, 108–10, 111–12, 113, 115, 117, 123, 125, 137, 139–40, 145 see also reflection Augustine 23–5, 100–1 axioms see common notions Beck, Lesley 121 Beyssade, Jean-Marie 76–9, 116 body human 9, 15, 19, 21–2, 30, 38, 43, 45, 60, 62, 91, 93, 108, 125–6 as substance 66, 108, 120, 122, 129, 131 see also extension, idea of Carriero, John 122 causal principles 33, 114–16 Chappell, Vere 3, 10, 12, 14 clarity and distinctness 40, 45–52, 77–9 and analysis 124–5 and attention 61–2 of idea of extension 121, 123, 129 and idea of God 77–9 of ideas of shapes 121, 129–30, 132

and natural light 97, 106 and truth 70, 97 Clarke, Desmond 17–18 cogito 60, 67–9, 72, 96, 109–10, 111–12 common notions 4–5, 36, 82–4, 108–9, 115, 134, 140, 141–5 conscientia 57–8, 107, 109 see also implicit awareness containment 25, 36–7, 40, 49–52, 60, 61–2, 77–9, 110, 116, 127–8, 136, 139–40, 143–4 Cottingham, John 2–3, 8, 13, 16–18, 21–2, 124 dispositional account 2, 13–19, 21–2, 25, 40–2 distinctness see clarity and distinctness Doney, Willis 77 eternal truths 5, 84, 108 Euclid 136, 138, 140, 141–4 evil genius 38, 79, 116 existence formal 12 objective 12 extension, idea of 24, 45, 108, 120–6, 128–32, 136 factitious ideas 31, 38–40, 42, 73 freedom see will geometry diagrams 138 ideas of shapes 23–4, 121, 126–32, 136 propositional truths 23–4, 136 see also mathematics; triangle

176

Index

Gewirth, Alan 47–8, 50 God idea of 11, 13, 18, 20, 29, 30, 34–5, 38, 39, 40, 46, 50, 56, 72–9, 113, 116, 128, 145 intellect 93, 96 not a deceiver 32, 52, 111, 116 proofs for existence of 33–4, 76–9 will 65, 75, 93, 96 idea as disposition 13–22, 40–2, 57, 62, 73, 130 in material sense 3, 7, 10–13, 20, 32–5, 40, 45, 46–9, 51–2, 59, 61, 69, 73–4, 77, 79 as mode of body 7, 9–10 as mode of mind 7–10 in objective sense 3,7, 10–13, 20–1, 34–5, 40, 45–9, 51–2, 57, 61, 64, 73–4, 76–9, 130 see also adventitious ideas; factitious ideas imagination 8–9, 30–2, 87–90, 91, 93, 98, 108, 121–2, 125, 131, 137–9, 141–4 implicit awareness 51–2, 54–9, 67–70, 78, 105, 109, 111–13, 115, 139 infancy 16–17, 19–22, 54–5, 62, 64, 66 ingenium 87–8, 137 intellect see pure intellect intuition 85, 87

Menn, Stephen 73, 74–5, 77 method analytic 72, 116–17, 138, 146 of doubt 60, 65, 67 synthetic 116–17, 146 Morris, John 81, 85, 86–93, 97–8, 104 motion, laws of 144–5 Nadler, Steven 17–18 natural impulse 75, 76, 111, 113–14, 116 natural light faculty of 22, 66, 81, 84–104, 107, 111–13 truths perceived by 25, 81–4, 105–10, 112, 114–16 nature of corporeal substance 125, 129 laws of 144 and limitation 74–6, 79, 113–14, 116 of a thinking thing 12, 29–34, 38–9, 42–4, 101, 112 natures true and immutable essences 20, 35–8, 40, 51–2, 60, 62, 130 see also simple natures Nicole, Pierre 49

light divine 100–2 physical 98–100, 102–4 see also natural light

passion see action pineal gland 31–2, 45, 62–3, 92 Plato doctrine of recollection 23–4, 26, 134, 141 Meno 18, 23–4, 136 Phaedo 134–5 Republic 100 ‘present but submerged’ account 2, 17–19, 21–2, 124 pure intellect 29, 31–3, 38, 39, 63–5, 67, 86, 91, 93–4, 108, 112, 121–4, 129, 134–5, 137–9, 142–4

McRae, Robert 2–3, 8, 15–16, 23–7, 54–6, 60, 67–8, 119–21, 139 mathematics 24–6, 137, 140–1 see also geometry; triangle

Radner, Daisie 58 Radner, Michael 58 reality 115 recollection account 2, 23–6

judgment 16, 65, 91, 93, 96–7, 106, 107 Kemp Smith, Norman 85 Kenny, Anthony 40–2, 84, 86

Index reflection 15, 25, 33, 54–62, 67–8, 70, 72, 74, 110, 113, 116, 122–5, 145 see also attention reflective account 2, 23, 25–6, 54–62 reflective knowledge 57–9, 109 reliance on diagrams 138 of thought on an idea 70–2, 105–6, 109–10, 115–17, 124–5, 134, 139, 143 Schmaltz, Tad 43 Schouls, Peter 85 sense-perception faculty of 30–1, 32, 114, 122, 138, 142, 144, 145 sensory ideas 21, 41–2, 64, 108, 122–3, 125–6, 127–9, 132–4, 135, 136, 139, 143–4 see also adventitious ideas simple natures 3–5, 25, 35–7, 49, 52, 55, 80, 106–10, 112, 123, 134, 144 Stump, Eleonore 95 substance attributes and modes 31 dualism 9–10, 94

177

idea of 71, 129 synthesis 72, 124, 125 see also method, synthetic triangle 37, 49, 51, 61, 126–8, 132–4, 136, 140 understanding see pure intellect unified account 3, 19–22, 23, 28 Van de Pitte, Frederick 128 vision 47, 48, 100 Vlastos, Gregory 24 volition see will wax analogy to mind 9, 15 in Second Meditation 76, 114, 122–3, 126, 129, 131 will as active faculty 15, 86, 87, 89, 90–1 and attention 39, 63–6, 125, 131, 140 freedom of 75, 95–6, 109 and natural light 93–8, 102, 106, 107 Wilson, Margaret 93, 139–40 Winkler, Kenneth 42–3

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