Gerauld De Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian

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Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian

Fred Ablondi Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian

Marquette Studies in Philosophy No. 44 Andrew Tallon, Series Editor © 2005 Marquette University Press Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-3141 All rights reserved. www.marquette.edu/mupress/

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ablondi, Fred, 1966Gerauld de Cordemoy : atomist, occasionalist, Cartesian / Fred Ablondi. p. cm. — (Marquette studies in philosophy ; no. 44) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-87462-667-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-87462-667-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Cordemoy, Géraud de, d. 1684. I. Title. II. Series: Marquette studies in philosophy ; #44. B1828.C64A25 2005 194—dc22 2005024879

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Cover photo of the Panthéon, Paris, France, by Andrew J. Tallon, November, 2003.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements......................................................................... 7 1 Cordemoy and Seventeenth-Century Thought............................ 9 Life........................................................................................... 10 Cordemoy and Cartesianism..................................................... 13 2 Cordemoy and Atomism........................................................... 15 Descartes’ Theory of Matter...................................................... 15 Cordemoy’s Argument for Atomism.......................................... 22 Trois Inconveniens...................................................................... 30 Reactions.................................................................................. 43 3 Cordemoy and Occasionalism................................................... 55 The Argument from the Discernement....................................... 56 Malebranche’s Arguments......................................................... 60 A Letter to a Cartesian.............................................................. 75 Human Freedom....................................................................... 77 Occasionalism and the Discours Physique de le Parole................. 80 4 Cordemoy and Cartesianism..................................................... 87 Motion and Rest....................................................................... 87 The Mind-Body Union............................................................. 96 The Distinction of the Mind and the Body............................... 99 A Cartesian Account of Speech............................................... 106 Descartes, Moses, and the Creation of the World.................... 112 Appendix.................................................................................... 115 Works Cited............................................................................... 117 Index.......................................................................................... 125

Abbreviations Below is a list of works frequently cited in the notes and text; full references can be found in the “Works Cited” section at the end of the book.

Works by Cordemoy: CG Oeuvres Philosophiques, edited by P. Clair & F. Girbal. All translations of Cordemoy are my own.

Works by Descartes: AT Oeuvres de Descartes, 12 vols., edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery; referred to by volume number and page number CSM The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols., translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch, and A. Kenny (vol. 3 only); referred to by volume and page number.

Works by Malebranche: OC Oeuvres complètes, 20 vols., general editor A. Robinet; referred to by volume number, page number. LO The Search After Truth, translated by T.M. Lennon and P.J. Olscamp. JS Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, translated by N. Jolley and D. Scott. Note: If an English translation of an author is not cited in the text, the translation is my own.

Acknowledgements It is often remarked in prefaces that one of the pleasures of completing a book is the opportunity it grants the author to thank all those who assisted both directly and indirectly in that completion. And such is my feeling. To begin with, then, I would like to thank two of my undergraduate professors at The College of William & Mary, Earl McLane and Bill Cobb Jr., for both their patience with a very mediocre philosophy student and the model of outstanding undergraduate teaching with which they provided me. At The Catholic University of America it was my privilege to study with Kurt Pritzl, O.P., who in addition to being both my teacher and good friend has baptized my four children, and Dan Dahlstrom, with whom I wrote my M.A. Thesis. At Marquette University I was very fortunate to learn from two men in particular, Tom Prendergast, my dissertation advisor, and Lee Rice, without whose assistance I’m sure I wouldn’t be making a living teaching philosophy today. Both Tom and Lee took the time to provide me with comments on Chapter Two of this book, for which I am grateful. While I never had the opportunity to take a class from Dan Garber, Tom Lennon, or Steve Nadler, I have learned a great deal from their writings, and my debts to them are evident from the notes to this book. Finally, thanks goes to Tad Schmaltz, who read and made comments on the entire manuscript, for no other reasons than that he is a very kind and generous person. The idea for this book came to me during a fourteen hour drive in the pouring rain as I returned to Arkansas from a conference on the reception of Descartes’ philosophy which Tad had organized at Duke University in March of 2002. It is thus fitting that he should play a role in the book’s development and completion. Peggy Morrison of the Hendrix College Bailey Library deserves special thanks for her filling of many, many interlibrary loan requests from me. Muriel Ifrah provided many helpful suggestions with the translations from the French. Outside of academia, I would like to thank my family, my wife Susan and my children Eileen, Timothy, Elizabeth, and Matthew, for

Fred Ablondi~Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian

all of their love and support. As she has so often done for my writings in the past, Susan again proof read the entire manuscript. Lastly, my deepest thanks go to my parents, Fred and Frances, whose support for my pursuit of my interests, whatever they have been, has been unfailing for as long as I can remember; this book is dedicated, with love, to them.

Conway, Arkansas Fall 2004

1 Cordemoy and Seventeenth-Century Cartesian Thought The years following the death of René Descartes in 1650 saw his philosophical supporters engaged in numerous controversies concerning both the beliefs which they thought he really held and those which they felt he should have held. Was Descartes a direct realist, or a representative realist? Do his metaphysics necessarily imply occasionalism? Was he correct to see the eternal truths as contingent upon the will of God? Was he wrong to hold that we have innate ideas? Is the existence of the external world something that must be taken on faith, or do our very ideas reveal its existence? Is matter incapable of being destroyed, even by God? Are our minds essentially or merely accidentally in union with our bodies? Are ideas modes of minds, or do they exist in the divine understanding? Can, and if so how, does one reconcile Cartesian metaphysics with the Church’s doctrine of transubstantiation? Can Cartesian cosmogony be reconciled with the Book of Genesis? Such questions touch on but a small number of the issues debated, both among Cartesians and between Cartesians and their opponents, in the second half of the seventeenth century. Yet despite the great amount of philosophical activity during this time, until recently little attention had been paid in the English-speaking world to the Cartesians of the 1650’s, 60’s, and 70’s. Fortunately, things have begun to change. For example, Nicolas Malebranche, long considered by many Anglophone scholars to be a minor figure in seventeenth-century philosophical thought, is now rightly recognized as a thinker of the rank of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Book-length treatments of his work by Charles McCracken in the 1980’s and by Nicholas Jolley, Steven Nadler, and Tad Schmaltz in the 1990’s have had a great deal to do with the ‘rediscovery’ of Malebranche’s thought. Recently other figures, including Arnauld, Gassendi, Desgabets, Régis, La Forge, as well as some of the Dutch Cartesians, have received

10 Fred Ablondi~Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian

overdue attention from Anglophone historians of philosophy. For this, thanks are due to Thomas Lennon, Steven Nadler, Tad Schmaltz, and Theo Verbeek, among others. In addition, the appearance of the twovolume Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (1998), edited by Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, has provided scholars with a valuable resource for research on the thought of many neglected thinkers. With all this recent scholarly attention directed at the Cartesian philosophy of the late seventeenth century, it is something of a surprise that almost no notice has be taken of the thought of Gerauld de Cordemoy. Not only was he considered in his time to be one of the leading Cartesians in France, he was in some ways the most original—some would say most heretical—of Descartes’ followers. He was one of the first, if not the first, to argue that Cartesian metaphysics implies occasionalism, and was perhaps the sole Cartesian atomist. Yet in the last century, only two book-length studies of his work have appeared, both in French, and one of those in 1907. And while there have been some journal articles in English in which Cordemoy is considered, it is almost always in the course of a survey of the reactions of several Cartesians to a controversial issue or point of interpretation, such as the various types of interaction to which occasionalism is appealed to explain. The primary concern of this book is to lay out the arguments Cordemoy employed to arrive at his atomism and his occasionalism, treating them as philosophically and historically important in their own right. But in doing so, it will also be important to remember that no matter to what degree he deviated from ‘orthodox’ Cartesianism, he was still very much in the Cartesian tradition.

I. Life

Gerauld de Cordemoy was born in Paris in October of 1626. His father Gerauld, a professor at the University of Paris, had married Nicole Bucé on March 1, 1620. In addition to Gerauld, Nicole gave birth to three other children, all daughters: Catherine (1621), who died before Nadler (1998b, 672), following Rodis-Lewis (1993, 414) and Battail (1973, 1) gives October 6 as the date of Cordemoy’s birth; Clair and Girbal (1968, 15), on the other hand, give October 6 as the date of his baptism. Albert Balz (1951, 3) gives 1600 as the year of Cordemoy’s birth, which is certainly incorrect, seeing that his father was born in 1591.

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her second birthday, Marie (1622), and Nicole (1634). Gerauld le pere died at the age of 45, when his son was nine years old. Other than the early loss of his father, nothing is known of Cordemoy’s childhood or his early education. Even the date of his marriage to Marie de Chazelles is unknown, but it must have occurred when Cordemoy was fairly young, inasmuch as we know that their first child, Louis-Gerauld, was born on December 7, 1651, shortly after Cordemoy’s 25th birthday. Gerauld and Marie would have four more children: Joseph-Charles, Jacques, Jeanne-Marguerite, and Adrien. Cordemoy was a lawyer by training, but he had a keen interest in the philosophy of his day. As early as 1657 he was attending many of the philosophical salons and Cartesian conferences of Paris, including conferences organized by Emmanuel Maignan, a fellow atomist, and Jacques Rohault, the Cartesian physicist, and the salon of the Cartesian Mme. de Bennevaux. When in 1664 an edition of Descartes’ previously unpublished Le Monde first appeared, included with it was a work by Cordemoy entitled Discours de l’action des corps, as well as a discourse on heat by Rohault. Cordemoy would expand this brief physical treatise into his major philosophical work, Le Discernement A letter written by Antoine Bossuet shortly after Cordemoy’s death refers to five, and not four, sons, but there are no other records that support this. Despite this connection, Prost (1907, 59-62) feels it improbable that Maignan influenced Cordemoy’s acceptance of atomism, given the differences in their arguments for the doctrine. Interestingly, Battail (1973, 7) asks (but does not answer) whether Maignan’s own philosophy might have provided the germ of what would become Cordemoy’s argument for occasionalism. For more details concerning the organizers of and participants in these and other salons and conferences, see Cordemoy 1968, 26-33; Battail 1973, 6-10. Descartes had written the work in the early 1630’s, but withdrew it from publication when he learned of the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Galileo, fearful that a similar fate awaited him were his views to become well-known. The full title of the work is Le Monde de Mr Descartes ou le Traité de la lumière et autre principaux objets de sens, avec un Discours de l’Action des Corps et un autre des Fièvres, composes selon les principes du même Auteur. The Discours became the second of the six discourses that comprise the Discernement.


du corps et de l’âme en six discours pour servir à l’éclaircissment de la physique, published in 1666. In the first three discourses Cordemoy presents his atomism and his mechanistic physics, while in the second three he formulates his occasionalism and applies it to both interactions between bodies and between the human body and the soul. In 1668 Cordemoy published his Copie d’une lettre ecrite à un sçavant religieux de la Comagnie de Jésus, his letter to the Jesuit Cossart in which Cordemoy sought to reconcile Descartes’ philosophy with the book of Genesis.10 In the same year he also published his Discours physique de la parole, an investigation into the nature of speech. This work was widely read, and Cordemoy was soon recognized as one of the leading French philosophers of his day. So popular was the Discours that Molière used Cordemoy as his model for the Master of Philosophy in his play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.11 In the twentieth century, Noam Chomsky recognized the importance of the Discours in his Cartesian Linguistics (1966). Cordemoy also wrote several shorter treatises which appeared in posthumous collections of his work; these include his Traitez de Metaphysique and Traitez sur l’Histoire et le Politique. But during the last decade of his life he devoted much of his time to the research for and writing of a history of France. It was unfinished at the time of his death, but was completed and published by his son, Louis-Gerauld, in two volumes (1685, 1689). This attention to history occurred no doubt in part because in 1673 Cordemoy, on the recommendation of Bossuet, had been appointed tutor to the dauphin, the future King Louis XV. Shortly after his appointment, Cordemoy was elected, in 1675, to l’Académie Français,12 and in 1683 he became its director. In the 1704 edition of Cordemoy’s collected works the title had changed to Six discours sur la Distinction et l’Union du Corps et de l’Âme. … pour montre que tout ce que Monsieur Descartes à écrit du systême du monde, & de l’ame des bêtes, semble être tire du premier chapitre de la Genese. 10 Gouhier (1926, 95) notes that Daniel, in his Le Voyage du Monde de Descartes (1690), referred to the Lettre as “un véritable manifeste cartésien.” 11 In fact, some of the character’s lines are taken almost verbatim from the Discours. See Battail 1973, 14-15 for a comparison between the words of Cordemoy and Molière’s Maître. 12 The text of his Discours de Réception appears in Cordemoy 1968, 5963.

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The following year, after a brief illness, Cordemoy died, on October 15, 1684, at the age of 58.

II. Cordemoy and Cartesianism

In the first two chapters of this book, we will take a close look at the two positions for which Cordemoy is most known, his atomism and his occasionalism. In addition to laying out Cordemoy’s arguments, attention will also be given to the thought of many of Cordemoy’s contemporaries on these two subjects. As mentioned, Cordemoy was the only one of Descartes’ leading supporters who argued for atomism and was seen by some as something of a heretic for doing so. His contemporary Dom Robert Desgabets was particularly troubled by the fact that Cordemoy championed the doctrine, seeing it as giving ‘aid and comfort’ to the enemy of Cartesianism, viz., Gassendi and his camp. With regard to occasionalism, Cordemoy’s embracing of it is, with the exceptions of Malebranche and possibly Geulincx, more thoroughgoing (i.e., he appeals to it to explain more species of interaction) than any Cartesian. Yet despite Descartes’ explicit rejection of atomism, and despite the absence of any explicit endorsement of occasionalism in Descartes’ writings, I will demonstrate in the final chapter the various ways in which Cordemoy is rightly considered a Cartesian. Schmaltz (2002) has referred to the thought of Desgabets and Pierre-Sylvain Régis as “radical Cartesianism”; this phrase applies equally (though for very different reasons) to Cordemoy’s thought, but radical as it may be, it is still Cartesian.

2 Cordemoy and Atomism

C

ordemoy’s most drastic departure from orthodox Cartesian-

ism (if there can be said to be such a thing) is his acceptance of atomism, the doctrine that the physical world consists at its most basic level of indivisible, indestructible bodies existing in empty space. As this is such a departure from Descartes’ physics, I think it would be appropriate to begin with an overview of Descartes’ conception of the material world so as first to see the theory which Cordemoy will reject. Despite the many questions which this overview will raise concerning the metaphysical arguments Descartes employed to support his physics—questions raised by Descartes’ contemporaries as well as present-day scholars—we shall see that Cordemoy does not turn to atomism because of a problem or set of problems which he feels Descartes’ theory is unable to handle (although he does think there are such problems). Rather, it is his position that its very status as a substance precludes body from being infinitely divisible. We will then turn to advantages Cordemoy sees his atomism having over Descartes’ plenum theory. Finally, we will look at criticisms raised against Cordemoy by several of his contemporaries.

I. Descartes’ Theory of Matter

According to the Cartesian picture, everything in the created world is either a mind or a body. More carefully, we should say that for Descartes, everything is either a mind or a portion of the one, indefinitely extended body. For Descartes, the material universe consists of a single For more on this question, see Schmaltz 2002, 9-19; and Lennon 1993, 23-6. Gouhier (1926) asks, “Après le mort de Descartes, qu’est-ce que le cartésianisme? C’est la philosophie de Descartes vue par ses disciples” (80); in other words, Cartesianism is just what Descartes’ followers said it was. For our present purposes, we need not get into the matter of whether unions of minds and bodies (i.e., human beings) constitute a third category in Descartes’ ontology.


extended body, with ‘individual’ bodies distinguished by the quantity of motion and rest relative to neighboring bodies. This view of the physical world is a result of Descartes’ fundamental commitment to the principal that the very nature of body is extension, that is, the taking up of space in three dimensions. In Le Monde, Descartes notes his disagreement with those who want to “distinguish [matter] from its own quantity and from its external extension—that is, the property it has of occupying space.” He, in contrast, claims that “the quantity of the matter I have described does not differ from its substance any more than number differs from things numbered…I conceive its extension, or the property it has of occupying space, not as an accident, but as its true form and essence” (AT XI 35, 36; CSM I 92). And it is because it is the very essence of matter to be extended that where one finds extension, one finds matter; any length, width, or depth must be a length or width or depth of something. Before looking at Descartes’ argument for the claim that extension is the essence of matter, I want to make a few general remarks concerning Descartes’ metaphysics, both in order to understand his theory of matter and because it is the metaphysics which, at least at its most basic level, Cordemoy will accept. At its most fundamental level, Descartes’ is a substance-mode ontology. As said above, for Descartes the created universe consists of two types of substance, body and mind. In The Principles of Philosophy, which Descartes hoped would serve as an academic text for his philosophy, the term ‘substance’ is defined as “a thing which exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for its existence” (AT VIIIA 24; CSM I 210). Strictly speaking, then, the term (according to Descartes) applies only to God, for both body and mind depend on God for their existence. Yet Descartes does allow that “in the case of created things, some are of such a nature that they cannot exist without other things, Details of Descartes’ theory of individuation will be discussed in Section III below. Garber (1992) discusses three distinct arguments offered by Descartes for the conclusion that extension is the essence of body. The argument discussed below is the argument found most frequently in Descartes’ writings, in both published works and in letters. The two additional arguments considered by Garber each appear in one place only, one in the Fifth Meditation, one in the Sixth. For his discussion of these arguments, see Garber 1992, 80-93.

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while some need only the ordinary concurrence of God in order to exist. We make this distinction by calling the latter ‘substances’ and the former ‘qualities’ or ‘attributes’ of those substances” (ibid.). Substances, it is important to note, are not knowable directly; we never perceive substance itself, but rather we perceive what Descartes calls its “principal attribute”. This is the attribute “to which all its other properties are referred” (AT VIIIA 25; CSM I 210). In the case of body, Descartes holds that the principal attribute is extension; he writes: “extension in length, breadth and depth constitutes the nature of corporeal substance” and that “everything else which can be attributed to body presupposes extension, and is merely a mode of an extended thing” (ibid.). By calling “everything else” a mode, Descartes means that they have the status of being a state, or modification, of a substance, and thus modes are dependent for their very existence on the substance of which they are a mode. On the other hand, the principal attribute, also called at various points the ‘essence’ and the ‘nature’ of a substance, differs from the substance of which it is an attribute only through a distinction of reason. The preceding claims concerning substance, attributes, and modes are laid down in Part I of The Principles as the basic starting point of Descartes’ metaphysics. The claim that it is extension which is the principal attribute of body is argued for in Part II of The Principles. What we find there can be called an argument from conceivability; it appears in §4 of Part II, and is worth quoting in full: If we [lay aside preconceived opinions acquired by the senses, and make use of the intellect alone], we shall perceive that the nature of matter, or body considered in general, consists not in its being something which is hard or heavy or coloured, or which affects the senses in any way, but simply in its being something which is extended in length, breadth and depth. For as regards hardness, our sensation tells us no more than that the parts of a hard body resist the motion of our hands when they come into contact with them. If, whenever our hands moved in a given direction, all the bodies in that area were to move away at the same speed as that of our approaching hands, we should never have any sensation of hardness. And since it is quite unintelligible to suppose that, if bodies did move away in this fashion, they would thereby lose their

18 Fred Ablondi~Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian bodily nature, it follows that this nature cannot consist in hardness. By the same reasoning it can be shown that weight, colour, and all other such qualities that are perceived by the senses as being in corporeal matter, can be removed from it, while the matter itself remains intact; it thus follows that its nature does not depend on any of these qualities. (AT VIIIA 42; CSM I 224)

While the argument here is that no sensible qualities constitute the essence of matter, the inference is that extension, unlike these qualities, cannot be removed from the idea of body without that body ceasing to be a body. Note that this argument makes no use of the notion of all other properties ‘being referred to it’ that we saw Descartes used in Part I cited above. Instead, Descartes asks us to consider the idea of a body and eliminate from that idea everything that can be eliminated without the body ceasing to be a body. A few pages later, Descartes gives a specific example of this: Suppose we attend 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 first of all exclude hardness, since if the stone is melted or pulverized it will lose its hardness without thereby ceasing to be a body; next we will exclude colour, since we have often seen stones so transparent as to lack colour; next we will exclude heaviness, since although fire is extremely light it is still thought of as being corporeal; and finally we will exclude cold and heat and all other such qualities, either because they are not thought of as being in the stone, or because if they change, the stone is not reckoned on that account to have lost its bodily nature. After all this, we will see that nothing remains in the idea of the stone except that it is something extended in length, breadth and depth. (AT VIIIA 46; CSM I 227)

This passage is reminiscent of the ‘piece of wax’ passage in the Second Meditation. We are here, as there, asked to perform a ‘mental removal’ Thus the fact that we may not sense any qualities in a particular space does not imply that there is no matter in that space. This is for the best, since the requirement is false. As Garber (1992, 67) points out, duration is a property of bodies, yet not one conceived through extension. Duration, like order and number, follows from body’s being a substance.


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of the properties of a particular corporeal object, asking ourselves at each step whether the object is still a body after the removal. Some properties, such as cold or heat, were never in the object in the first place, but are sensations produced in us on the occasion of our touching the object, and so their removal will have no effect on the status of the object qua body. Others, such as weight and heaviness, are not properties of bodies but are rather produced by the (mechanical) interactions of bodies. Still other properties, such as motion, are properties of the object, but are not essential to it, since we can imagine them no longer in the object without that object ceasing to be a body. Again, the implication is that it is the property of being extended in length, breadth and depth which alone cannot be removed from our idea of the object and still have it be an idea of a body. As said, Descartes had presented a similar argument in the Second Meditation. There Descartes describes a piece of wax just taken from honeycomb; it still has “the taste of honey; it retains some of the scent of the flowers from which it was gathered; its colour, shape and size are plain to see; it is hard, cold and can be handled without difficulty; if you rap it with your knuckle it makes a sound” (AT VII 30; CSM II 20). But as he brings the wax close to a fire, “the residual taste is eliminated, the smell goes away, the colour changes, the shape is lost, the size increases; it becomes liquid and hot; you can hardly touch it, and if you strike it, it no longer makes a sound” (ibid.). The question before Descartes is, assuming it is the same wax before us—and Descartes says all would agree that it is—what was it that he understood so distinctly about the wax as a body: Perhaps the answer lies in the thought which now comes to mind; namely, the wax was not after all the sweetness of the honey, or the fragrance of flowers, or the whiteness, or the shape, or the sound, but was rather a body which presented itself to me in these various forms a little while ago, but which now exhibits different ones. But what exactly is it that I am imagining? Let us concentrate, take away everything which does not belong to the wax, and see what is left: merely something extended, flexible and changeable. (AT VII 30-1; CSM II 20)


As with the stone example from The Principles, his conclusion is that we arrive at what the wax is essentially by eliminating from our idea of it everything that can be removed without the wax ceasing to be a body. Unlike The Principles, however, Descartes is not concerned with demonstrating that the nature (or principal attribute) of body is extension; here, rather, his objective is to show that the nature of body, whatever it may turn out to be, is known not by the senses but by the intellect (AT VII 31; CSM II 21). For this reason, despite the similarities between the two arguments, it would be better, given our present concerns, to concentrate on the argument from Part II of The Principles, as Descartes is clear that his intention there is to demonstrate that the nature of body consists in extension alone. With regard to Cordemoy, the most important consequence of Descartes’ conception of body is the latter’s rejection of atomism. In dismissing the qualities of the Scholastics and instead conceiving of bodies in strictly quantitative terms, Descartes had made bodies, to borrow Garber’s phrase, the objects of geometry made real. If bodies are essentially objects taking up space in three dimensions, that is, objects having length, breadth and depth, we can always conceive of dividing those distances, and if we can conceive of it, it is in God’s power to bring it about. If this is so, “however many parts a body is divided into, each of the parts can be understood to be divisible and so we shall hold that quantity is indefinitely divisible” (AT VIIIA 15; CSM I 202). Atomism, on the other hand, implies that at some point, our division of the body must come to an end, that eventually we will arrive at a quantity of extension that cannot be further divided. But for Descartes, even this body will have as its principal attribute extension, and we can always conceive of dividing that extension: For if there were any atoms, then no matter how small we imagined them to be, they would necessarily have to be extended; and hence we could in our thought divide each of them into two or three smaller parts, and hence recognize their divisibility. For anything we can divide in our thought must, for that very reason, be known to be divisible. (AT VIIIA 51; CSM I 231) As he explicitly tells Hobbes; see AT VII 175; CSM II 124. Garber 1992, 63.


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It is, then, on the grounds that “however many parts a body is divided into, each of the parts can still be understood to be divisible” that Descartes thus rejects atomism (AT VIIIA 15; CSM I 202). Another significant consequence of Descartes’ understanding of body (and another reason for his opposition to atomism) is his rejection of the possibility of a void, that is, a space devoid of matter. The argument for this, as formulated in the The Principles, is this: The impossibility of a vacuum, in the philosophical sense of that in which there is no substance whatsoever, is clear from the fact that there is no difference between the extension of a space, or internal place, and the extension of a body. For a body’s being extended in length, breadth and depth in itself warrants the conclusion that it is a substance, since it is a complete contradiction that a particular extension should belong to nothing; and the same conclusion must be drawn with respect to a space that is supposed to be a vacuum, namely that since there is extension in it, there must necessarily be substance in it as well. (AT VIIIA 49; CSM I 230)

Since extension is an attribute, it must be an attribute of some substance. Nothing(-ness) has no properties, and thus cannot have the property of being extended—only a substance can. Thus where there is extension—a quantity of length, breadth and depth—there too must be material extension. In a letter to Henry More, Descartes explains that “since I consider such real properties [as size and shape] can only exist in a real body, I dared to assert that there can be no completely empty space, and that every extended being is a genuine body” (AT V 271; CSMK III 362). As Jonathan Bennett nicely puts it, for Descartes a vacuum would be “an instance of extension that does not consist in something’s being extended”.10 Descartes’ material universe is, then, a plenum, devoid of regions which can, in the strict sense, be said to be empty. Descartes used the following example to illustrate his position (it is an example which, we shall see, Cordemoy addressed): For Descartes’ rejection of atomism, see also AT VIIIA 325; CSM I 2878. 10 Bennett 2001, 32.

22 Fred Ablondi~Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian [A]s I have often said, nothingness cannot possess any extension. Hence, if someone asks what would happen if God were to take away every single body contained in a vessel, without allowing any other body to take the place of what had been removed, the answer must be that the sides of the vessel would, in that case, have to be in contact. For when there is nothing between two bodies they must necessarily touch each other. (AT VIIIA 50; CSM I 231)

The idea is that if there is a distance between the two sides of the vase, that distance must be a property of something—again, nothingness can have no properties. If there were no thing between the two sides, there could be no distance as a property of that nothing, and so the two sides would touch, since “every distance is a mode of extension, and therefore cannot exist without an extended substance” (ibid.). The point again is that there can be no void, and the entire physical world is a material plenum.

II. Cordemoy’s Argument for Atomism

There is, no doubt, more that can be said about Descartes’ arguments that extension is the essence of matter, but the preceding will be sufficient for our immediate purposes. The important consequences of Descartes’ position which will be relevant to our discussion of Cordemoy are the following: (1) the plenum theory: there is, strictly speaking, only one body, all of material extension; (2) the indefinite divisibility of matter: since it is the essence of body to be extended, and since for any quantity of extension we can always conceive of a division of that quantity, we can always (conceivably) divide an extended thing; and (3) the rejection of a void: there is no such thing as truly empty space, that is, there is no space devoid of matter. As we will see, Cordemoy will reject all three of these claims.11 11 It is ironic that Descartes was often considered to advocate atomism, despite his explicit rejection of the doctrine. In 1637 Fromondus had written him, accusing him of atomism. (For Descartes’ response, see AT I 413-424; CSMK III 61-66.) Some years later, John Webster, in his 1653 Academiarum examen, asks: “what shall I say of the Atomical learning revived by that noble and indefatigable person Renatus des Cartes” (quoted in Henry 1982, 229). And Lennon (1993, 9-10) quotes Cudworth referring (in 1731) to the “Mechanical or Atomical Philosophy, that hath been lately restored by Cartesius and Gassendus.” One reason for this confusion


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It was said above that Cordemoy did not come to accept atomism in the first place by raising objections to the Cartesian position and then appealing to atomism to take its place. In fact, he does just the opposite: Cordemoy first gives us his argument for atomism, and only then does he turn to problems which arise for those who accept Descartes’ position. This argument for atomism appears in the First Discourse of Le Discernement du corps et de l’âme en six discours (1666). Cordemoy begins the discourse with the following: “We know that there are Bodies and that their number is near infinite. We also know that there is Matter. But it seems to me that we do not have distinct enough notions of them, and that it is from this which come almost all of the errors of Physics” (CG 95). The ‘we’ of whom Cordemoy speaks is, of course, really a ‘they’: his accusation of conflating what are in his mind distinct concepts is leveled specifically against Descartes and other Cartesians of his own day. Descartes had frequently used the terms ‘body’ and ‘matter’ interchangeably. For example, in The Principles he speaks of “this extended thing that we call ‘body’ or ‘matter’” (AT IX, 41; CSM I, 223) and “the nature of matter, or body in general” (AT IX, 42; CSM I, 224). But if the Cartesians are guilty of conflating two distinct notions, how are ‘body’ and ‘matter’ to be properly understood? According to Cordemoy, bodies are, in the first place, extended substances. As it appears in the First Discourse, this claim is not, however, followed by an argument to support it; for that, we will have to wait. Instead, Cordemoy proceeds to discuss the nature of bodies, making five particular points about them. They are, we are first told, limited in their extension, and this limit is properly called the ‘figure’ of the body. Second—and this will be important for that to which we shall turn in a moment—“as each body is only a self-same substance” (CG 95), bodies are not divisible into smaller bodies, nor can the figure of a body change,12 nor are bodies penetrable by other was that, like atomists in general and Cordemoy in particular, Descartes explained physical change mechanistically, by appeal to the motions of the parts (corpuscles) that make up larger bodies. For the similarities and significant differences between Descartes and seventeenth-century atomists, see Garber 1992, 117-20. 12 Cordemoy apparently did not allow for the possibility that a body could undergo a change in its figure yet not have an increase or decrease in its extension.


bodies—“tout atome exclut tout autre atome,” as Battail put it.13 His third, fourth, and fifth claims echo Descartes: the relation a body has to other bodies is called its ‘place’; when this relation changes, a body is said to be in motion; and when the relation continues unchanged, the body is said to be at rest. As opposed to body, matter is clearly and distinctly understood (according to Cordemoy) as an assembly or collection of bodies. Bodies are thus parts of matter. Depending how these bodies are related to each other determines what sort of portion of matter the collection is: if they are very near each other, it is a heap (un tas); if they are “changing their position incessantly” (CG 96), it is a fluid (une liqueur); and if the bodies are not moving and cannot be separated from each other, it is a mass (une masse). According to Cordemoy, the reason for the confusion on the part of the Cartesians regarding these two distinct concepts is an overdependence on the senses: As we have a very clear idea of body, and as we know that they are extended substances, without thinking clearly we join this notion which we have of body to that which we have of matter. Taking a mass for a body, we consider it as a substance, believing that all that we see is only the same extension. And, because all that we see as extended is divisible, we thus join the notion of that which is extended to the notion of that which is divisible, such that we believe divisible all that is extended. (CG 97)

Bodies themselves are too small to be perceived; what we see are their assemblages, i.e., what he calls matter. We must be careful, Cordemoy warns us in good Cartesian spirit, not to too hastily judge what our senses report to us. It is bodies which truly can be said to be extended substances, and failure to note this distinction between body and matter is, according to Cordemoy, the source of the error of conceiving 13 Battail 1973, 87. Cf. Rohault: “With regard to Impenetrability; since a certain Portion of Matter, suppose a cubic Foot, has all that is necessary to such a Magnitude, we cannot conceive how another cubic Foot can be added to it, without making two cubic Feet: For suppose any one would reduce them to one cubic Foot by Penetration, this would not be so much reducing them to one cubic Foot, as it would be destroying the first Supposition; whence we are led to think, that the Parts of Matter are in their own Nature impenetrable” (1969 [1723], 23).


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of the whole of the material world as one extended substance. Strictly speaking, matter is not (essentially) extended; extension is a property of bodies, while quantity—containing such and such number of bodies—is a property of assemblages. Cordemoy’s acceptance of atomism is thus quickly established (in just over a page). But he has not presented an argument for his claim. Why is it that bodies, these imperceptible atoms, are extended substances, and not, as Descartes had held, that matter itself is the single extended substance? While some scholars have held that Cordemoy’s “reasoning is not altogether clear,”14 close attention to the text reveals his argument is based on the very notion of what it is to be a substance. It is precisely the definition of substance which precludes its being composed of parts into which it could be divided. Immediately following his discussion of the features of bodies and matter, Cordemoy writes that “as each body cannot be divided, it cannot have parts, while as matter is an assembly of bodies, it can be divided into as many parts as there are bodies” (CG 96). As was said above, according to Cordemoy, the division of a portion of matter cannot proceed ad infinitum; at some point, we will be left with two bodies, and at that point the division must cease “since each of them is a substance which cannot be divided” (CG 97). The implication of this claim is that indivisibility is an ontological requirement for anything to count as a substance. Cordemoy’s reason for holding this would seem to be that if a substance had parts into which it were divisible, it would be dependent on those parts in a way which would threaten its status as a substance. To explain a bit further: the Cartesian understanding of (created) substance is of a thing which depends on nothing (save God) for its existence.15 If a substance were composed of distinct parts, it would have an ontological dependence on those parts for it to be what it is. Substance-hood thus requires simplicity.16 The lesson Cordemoy draws from this is atomism: it is 14 Garber, Henry, Joy, and Gabbey 1998, 586. 15 See The Principles, Part I, §51: “By substance we can understand nothing other than a thing which exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for its existence” (AT VIIIA 24; CSM I 210). 16 Descartes did explicitly hold (AT VI 35; CSM I 128-9) that God, the one true, i.e., uncreated, substance is a simple being (so, e.g., God’s wisdom and God’s power do not constitute two distinct parts of the divine being)


individual bodies, by nature extended, and thus (according to him) by nature not divisible into parts, which are the true material substances. If indivisibility is an essential property of a substance, and “as each body cannot be divided, it is not able to have parts” (CG 96), only bodies can satisfy the criteria of being a substance. According to Cordemoy, matter is divisible not because its essence is extension and an extended thing can always be divided, but because matter is composed of bodies—substances—which can be separated from each other, but which can never themselves be divided. Whether or not extension is the principal attribute of bodies, bodies are first and foremost substances, and as such must, Cordemoy holds, be indivisible, that is, physically simple.17 In short, Descartes’ conception of body as essentially extended leads directly to his plenum theory and the infinite divisibility of matter; Cordemoy’s stress on bodies’ status as substances leads him to deny both of these positions.18 and that it is necessary that God be so, but he does not make simplicity a requirement for either body or mind to count as substances. Indeed, in the Second Set of Replies he writes that “the very nature of a body implies many imperfections, such as divisibility into parts, the fact that each of its parts is different and so on; for it is self-evident that it is a greater perfection to be undivided than to be divided, and so on” (AT VII 138; CSM I 99). While Cordemoy most certainly does not want to identify God with material extension (as Spinoza would), neither would he deny Descartes’ claim that the term ‘substance,’ when predicated of God and body, is done so equivocally. Nonetheless, I do think Cordemoy’s understanding of a substance, be it God or a body, is of a simple, and thus indivisible, entity. For more on Descartes and divine simplicity, see Kaufman 2003. 17 Leibniz, of course, would agree that substances must be simple, but would say this requirement implies spatial simplicity as well—monads, his ‘true atoms of nature,’ are not extended. I will return to Leibniz at the end of this chapter. 18 Readers familiar with Spinoza will recognize similarities between Cordemoy’s argument and the scholium to Proposition 15 of Part One of The Ethics, where Spinoza argues that substance cannot have parts which are infinite nor can it have parts which are finite, and so cannot have parts at all. An important difference between Cordemoy and Spinoza on this point is the latter’s monism; for Spinoza, there is only one substance, and it has both the attribute of extension and the attribute of thought (as well as infinite other attributes). Spinoza also followed Descartes in denying the possibility of a vacuum, as well has holding to the infinite divisibility of matter (considered as a mode of extended substance).


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Cordemoy makes another significant departure from Descartes’ physics. Rather than holding with Descartes that the nature of body is to be extended, Cordemoy claims that the nature of body is to be able to be extended: [A] self-same substance is not capable of being divided in itself, and if its nature is to be able to be extended, as soon as we know that this is its nature it must be admitted that since it is the same in all its extremities, none of its extremities are separable from it (CG 98).19

While the difference may seem minor, it is in fact quite revealing, for it alerts us to a distinction between what we can call ‘physical’ atomism and ‘metaphysical’ atomism.20 The core of physical atomism is the belief that it is physically impossible to divide matter infinitely.21 This does not preclude that conceptually, i.e., conceivable mathematically, matter may be infinitely divisible—Gassendi, for one, held that God could always divide any portion of matter, however small.22 While it is true that Cordemoy believed that the physical division of a body is 19 Elsewhere we find additional evidence that Cordemoy consciously departed from Descartes on this point. De la Ville, in his Sentiments de Monsieur Descartes (1680), recalls that “Monsieur Cordemoy once told me himself that he did not believe that actual extension was the absolute essence of bodies, but only that it is essential for them ‘to be able’ to be extended” (quoted in Rohault 1978, 158). For more on Cordemoy’s use of the potential/actual distinction in this regard, see Clair and Girbal’s notes to the Discernement (Cordemoy 1968, 306-7). 20 This is the terminology employed by Thomas Lennon (1989, 1993). 21 Lennon points out (1989, 81) that physical atomism is incompatible with the homogeneity of matter—if matter has the same properties at whatever level we consider it, then, if it is divisible on one level, it should be so on all. The Cartesian Rohault (1969 [1723], 32) had in fact used this argument against atomism. 22 Gassendi 1658 (vol. I), 308. For more on Gassendi’s account of the physical atomism/mathematical atomism distinction, see Joy 1987, 148164. It is worth noting that Rohault, who followed Descartes in holding that matter is infinitely divisible, makes just the opposite concession that Gassendi does. According to Rohault (1969 [1723], 31-2), God could have created atoms which are incapable of being divided by natural means. He concludes, however, that “this Property of not being capable of being divided by any external Being, is arbitrary, and not built upon any natural


impossible save for God, his metaphysical atomism includes the stronger belief that the ontologically fundamental units—in Cartesian terms, substances—exist as they do independently (metaphysically speaking) of everything else. As we saw, taking bodies as substances entails for Cordemoy that they possess just this metaphysical independence, and as we shall see in the next chapter, this view fits neatly with his occasionalism and the thought that no body is the cause of the actions of any other body. The connection between all of this and the passage cited above is that for Cordemoy, what is of real importance is that the nature of individual bodies (substances) is to be able, that is, to possess metaphysically the potentiality, to be extended. In other words, the actual physical existence of indivisible atoms is, while true, of secondary significance; the heart of Cordemoy’s atomism is the concept of material substances which are metaphysically independent of each other. If we stop at physical atomism, the existence of indivisible bodies is something that just happens to be true; metaphysical atomism, on the other hand, dictates the way that the concept of material substance must be (a fact discoverable a priori). The contrast of this type of atomism to Descartes and the plenum theory is obvious, but Cordemoy’s position is also in contrast with the Gassendists, who held to a physical atomism only.23 To maintain his metaphysical atomism, it would seem that Cordemoy must abandon another key Cartesian tenet, and not without some cost to his own system. In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes appeals to an understanding of ‘separable’ in his argument for the distinction of the mind and the body: “Hence from the fact that I can clearly and distinctly understand one thing apart from another is enough to make me certain that the two things are distinct, since they are capable of being separated, at least by God” (AT VII 78; CSM II 54). This is repeated in the Fourth Set of replies, where Descartes tells Arnauld that “the fact that one thing can be separated from another by the power of God is the very least that can be asserted in order to establish that there is a real distinction between the two” (AT VII 227; CSM II 160). If Cordemoy is going to maintain that despite the conceptual requirement that substances be simple, God could still divide matter Principle, but only on a mere Supposition, which does not alter their real nature” (31). 23 For more on this point, see Lennon 1993, 138-140.


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ad infinitum, he must, it would seem, reject Descartes’ understanding of distinctness as “separable, at least by God.” For if he does not, then he must admit that, conceptually, the parts of atoms are distinct, and this would seem to threaten the simplicity of material substances. Yet if Cordemoy does reject Descartes’ understanding of ‘distinct,’ he cannot appeal to it when he himself argues for the distinction of the mind and the body in the Sixth Discourse of the Discernement.24 Just as Descartes’ plenum theory of matter demands a rejection of the void, Cordemoy’s metaphysical atomism demands that there is space devoid of matter. According to Cordemoy, since bodies, as substances, depend on nothing else (save, of course, God), if we suppose three contiguous bodies, the destruction of the middle one can have no effect on the other two. Here Cordemoy returns to Descartes’ example of the vase: Some hold the view that if all the bodies filling a vase were destroyed, the sides of the vase would be brought together. I admit that I do not understand this reasoning, and am not able to conceive what makes one body dependent on another for its subsistence. It could well be that the bodies which surround the vase, pushing on the sides, would crush it if the sides were not supported from within by other bodies. But to say that as soon as all the bodies are removed from within, the sides must be brought together, without any pressure on these same sides, and to make an argument against the void by this supposition—I must say, if this is a good argument, then I fail to understand the force of it. I believe I see very clearly that two bodies would be able to subsist, if one at a distance from another, a great number of bodies could be put between them, or none put there, without bringing them together or forcing them apart. (CG 103-4)

Each distinct body, the collection of which make up the sides of the vase, is a substance in itself, and thus is not effected metaphysically by what happens to any other body. In other words, the reason that the two sides would not necessarily touch is that they are composed 24 We shall return to Cordemoy’s argument for the mind-body distinction in Chapter Four. We shall see that this is not the only trouble his argument faces.


of bodies which are ontologically independent of each other. The implication is that body and extension are not coextensive.25

III. Trois Inconveniens

Following his argument for atomism based on the analysis of the concept of substance, Cordemoy turns to a discussion of some of the problems (les inconveniens) to which he sees Descartes’ plenism leading. It is important to recognize that the difficulties are not presented by Cordemoy as his reason for embracing atomism—the argument based on the indivisibility of substances has done that. The inconveniens are presented rather as ‘benefits,’ as it were, of adopting atomism; they are advantages to Cordemoy’s physics, philosophical problems which Descartes’ followers must face, but which Cordemoy does not. So while we would not want to deny that Cordemoy sees these are further reasons for accepting his brand of atomism, they are not part of the argument which led him to accept it in the first place.26 Cordemoy’s first complaint is the vagueness which he sees in the Cartesians’ indefinite/infinite distinction, specifically in regard to their claim for the indefinite divisibility of matter. Descartes was usually careful to refer to matter as indefinitely extended and indefinitely divisible.27 He explains his reasons for this in Principles I, 27: Our reason for using the term ‘indefinite’ rather than ‘infinite’ in these cases is, in the first place, so as to reserve the term ‘infinite’ for God alone. For in the case of God alone, not only do we fail to recognize any limits in any respect, but our understanding positively 25 His metaphysical atomism aside, it is clear that Cordemoy needs to say something about how to account for a distance which is not the distance of a substance if he wants to subscribe to a Cartesian substance-mode ontology. 26 This point is stressed because scholars are not always careful to note it. For example, in his discussion of Cordemoy’s second perceived inconvenience for Descartes, Garber (1992) writes that “for this reason (among others), Cordemoy was led to adopt a kind of atomism” (179). Balz (1951) also sees the second inconvenience as Cordemoy’s argument for atomism; I will turn to his account below. 27 Descartes is not always so careful; to Plempius he speaks of “a continuous body, divisible to infinity” (AT I 422, CSM III 65), and in the First Set of Replies he writes of “the infinite number of divisions in a finite quantity” (AT VII 106; CSM II 77).


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tells us that there are none. Secondly, in the case of other things, our understanding does not in the same way positively tell us that they lack limits in some respect; we merely acknowledge in a negative way that any limits which they may have cannot be discovered by us. (AT VIIIA 15; CSM I, 202)

The reader who finds Descartes’ thinking on this matter somewhat unclear should not feel alone. 28 Descartes’ contemporary Gassendi admitted that he could not make sense of it,29 and Cordemoy found the distinction puzzling as well. He writes: When I asked [the Cartesians] if this substance [i.e., matter], which they believe to be divisible, is divisible to infinity, as it seems to me their supposition would give them to understand, they responded that it is not, but that it is divisible indefinitely. When I begged them to explain this indefinite division to me, I was led to understand it in the same way that the whole world understands the infinite. (CG 99)

Cordemoy goes on to say that if in fact indefinite divisibility comes down to infinite divisibility, “there is something inconceivable in that” (ibid.). In other words, if, ‘indefinite’ really amounts to ‘infinite’, Cordemoy’s charge is that division of a body ad infinitum is inconceivable. On the other hand, by taking bodies, as substances, to be necessarily indivisible, Cordemoy sees no such trouble arising. There are several responses one might want to make here on Descartes’ behalf. One would be to deny that the two concepts in fact reduce to the same thing. Frequently Descartes distinguishes them in epistemological terms: ‘indefinite’ is predicated of that which is limitless as far we can tell. In the early work Le Monde Descartes compares our situation to that of someone out at sea, for whom the water appears to go on forever in all directions (but who would be wise not to conclude that it in fact goes on forever). In a like way, he warns, we must be careful not to suppose that matter extends infinitely in all directions, but should say merely that this is how we perceive it from our vantage point. He suggests we consider “the matter which God 28 For more on the indefinite/infinite distinction in Descartes, see Koyré 1957, Chapter Four; Wilson 1986; Ariew 1987; and Barbone 1995. 29 See Gassendi 1658 vol. I, 263A.


has created extends indefinitely far beyond in all directions. For it is much more reasonable to prescribe limits to the action of our mind than to the works of God” (AT XI 32; CSM I 90). This understanding of the term ‘indefinite’ is also present in Descartes’ later writings. In a letter to More of 5 February 1649, Descartes claims that “God is the only thing I positively understand to be infinite. As to other things like the extension of the world and the number of parts into which matter is divisible, I confess I do not know whether they are absolutely infinite; I merely know that I know no end to them” (AT V 275; CSMK III 364). He admits that “though I cannot count all the parts into which [matter] is divisible (and which I say are on that account indefinite in number), yet I cannot assert that their division by God could never be completed, because I know that God can do more things than I can encompass within my thought” (AT V 273-4; CSMK III 364). A bit later he adds that “when I say that matter is indefinitely extended, I am saying that it extends further than anything a human being can conceive” (AT V 275; CSMK III 364). Descartes’ point here is that we say of God that He is infinite because we clearly understand Him to be so; matter, on the other hand we describe as indefinite both in extension and divisibility because we recognize no limits in either regard. However, we do not know if this is because matter is in fact limitless or whether it merely appears that way to us as a result of our finite understanding. A 15 April 1649 letter to More continues in the same vein. Descartes writes that “the reason why I say that the world is indeterminate, or indefinite, is that I can discover no limits in it; but I would not dare to call it infinite” (AT V 344; CSMK III 374), despite that “it conflicts with my conception, or, what is the same, I think it involves a contradiction, that the world should be finite or bounded” (AT V 345; CSMK III 374). On this epistemological conception of the indefinite, the picture we get is this: with regard to both the extension and divisibility of matter, we are not able to comprehend any limitations, and though we do not have any reason to think that there are such limitations, we do not clearly and distinctly understand that it lacks such limitations. As he writes to Chanut, while it seems “it is impossible to prove or even conceive that there are bounds in the matter of which the earth is composed,” we do not and cannot know with certainty that there


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are no such bounds, inasmuch as “there may be some reasons which are known to God” that there need be limits to matter’s extension and/or its divisibility (AT V 52; CSMK III 320). God, on the other hand, is clearly and distinctly conceived by us to have no limitations, and thus (alone) can be said to be infinite. It is not the case, one must take care to observe, that we have a clear understanding of the infinite, but rather a clear understanding that God is, in fact, infinite. At other times the distinction is framed in metaphysical terms.30 For example, Descartes writes to Clerselier that “I never use the word ‘infinite’ to signify the mere lack of limits (which is something negative, for which I have used the term ‘indefinite’) but to signify a real thing” (AT V 356; CSMK III 377). This understanding can also be seen in Descartes’ replies to the First Set of Objections (from Caterus): Now I make a distinction here between the indefinite and the infinite. I apply the term ‘infinite’, in the strict sense, only to that which no limits of any kind can be found; and in this sense God alone is infinite. But in cases like the extension of imaginary space, or the set of numbers, or the divisibility of the parts of a quantity, there is merely some respect in which I do not recognize a limit; so here I use the term ‘indefinite’ rather than ‘infinite’, because these items are not limitless in every respect. (AT VII 113; CSM II 81)

While Descartes does refer to his ‘inability to recognize limits’, the emphasis here is not so much on our epistemological shortcomings, but rather on the positive property of being infinite Descartes knows God to possess as “a real thing”. The contrast is to matter, which at most can be said to have no limits, and Descartes characterizes this as a negative property, the denial of something rather than the attribution of anything real.31 30 Ariew (1987, 155) denies that one can attribute this metaphysical understanding of the distinction to Descartes, but his argument (in note 66) is against there being a notion of “infinite in its own kind” (but finite in other respects) present in Descartes’ thought, and not, as far as I can tell, against the metaphysical understanding I present here. 31 The reader may note that the passage cited above from The Principles Part I, 27 contains both an epistemological and a metaphysical distinction between the two concepts.


Putting aside this metaphysical understanding of the infinite and the indefinite and concentrating for the moment on the epistemological distinction, if Cordemoy’s complaint is that infinite divisibility is inconceivable, one could, arguing on Descartes’ behalf, in a sense agree: extension or divisibility past the point of our comprehension is just how Descartes defines ‘indefinite’. But what exactly is it, one could ask, that we are unable to conceive about matter and the presence or lack of limitations to its extension and, more relevant to our concerns, its divisibility? In The Principles Descartes says that “however many parts a body is divided into, each of the parts can still be understood to be divisible and so we shall hold that quantity is indefinitely divisible” (AT VIIIA 15; CSM I 202; emphasis added). A 19 January 1642 letter to Gibiuef goes even further, stating that not only can we understand the division of any body, we must—if we have a clear understanding of extension—understand that it is always further divisible: We can say that the existence of atoms, or parts of matter which have extension and yet are indivisible, involves a contradiction, because it is impossible to have the idea of an extended thing without also having the idea of half of it, or a third of it, and so conceiving it as being divisible by two or three. [AT III 477; CSMK III 202]

So we are left with the question of just what is inconceivable. One option suggested by this passage is that while we can understand the fact that every portion of matter possesses the property of being divisible, conceiving of division at some point—imagining the performing an actual division—exceeds our conceptual powers.32 For example, I imagine cutting an orange in half, and again in half, and again, but at some point I can no longer form an image of the division. It may indeed be true that my imagination is so limited, but if this is what Descartes has in mind, and if this is what Cordemoy meant when he 32 There is a passage from Le Monde which may also suggest this reading; speaking of the parts into which a body can be divided, Descartes writes that “I do not want to determine if their number is infinite or not, but at least it is certain that with regard to our knowledge, it is indefinite, and that we can suppose that there are more millions of parts in the least little grain of sand than can be perceived with our eyes” (AT XI 12). The emphasis here is on the actual limitation on the abilities of our senses or imagination.


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said that infinite divisibility is inconceivable, the two are in agreement. But in that case, Descartes’ distinction does not threaten Cordemoy’s atomism, for Cordemoy can on the one hand admit the conceptual (or mathematical) division of any quantity while still consistently maintain that there are bodies which in fact cannot be so divided, at least not by any natural means. On the other hand, if for Descartes the objects of the physical world are just, as Garber puts it, the objects of geometry made real, it is hard to see what is inconceivable about taking half of any quantity, however small. What, after all, is inconceivable in dividing a number by 2 (or any number)? This mathematical division would seem to be what Descartes had in mind when he wrote to Mersenne that for any body of any length, “we could divide it at least in our imagination, which would suffice to guarantee that it was not indivisible” (AT III 214; CSMK III 155). Again, though, we may ask—of Cordemoy or Descartes—what is inconceivable in that? Summing up, then, it seems that if on the one hand Descartes is claiming that the actual division of a physical object ad infinitum is beyond the powers of human imagination, this is irrelevant to Cordemoy and his metaphysical atomism. On the other hand, if the claim is that conceptually we are at some point unable to further divide a body, this seems plainly false according to his system, inasmuch as any quantity, however small, can always be divided in half. Indeed, that Descartes recognized that such division is always conceivable seems clear from his remark in The Principles that “however many parts a body is divided into, each of the parts can still be understood to be divisible” (AT VIIIA 15; CSM I 202). But regardless of what Descartes thought was beyond human conceivability, one can certainly see why Cordemoy thought that “indefinite” and “infinite” amounted to the same thing. Still, there remains the question of what it is that Cordemoy finds inconceivable about infinite (or indefinite) divisibility. He is not making the charge, as others would later, that the infinite extension and divisibility of matter necessarily has Spinozistic conclusions for the nature of God.33 What Cordemoy can do is admit that while such a 33 For the view that in Descartes the indefinite does collapse to the infinite, and that this has the consequence of committing Descartes to Spinozism, see Barbone 1995, 38.


mathematical division is always possible, this is irrelevant to the question of whether there exist physical bodies which cannot be divided (again, save by God). But to do this, and to flesh out his remark regarding the inconceivability of dividing a body ad infinitum, he must appeal to the argument for atoms based on the concept of substance. In other words, it is not a problem for Cartesians per se, but only becomes a problem in light of a prior acceptance of atomism. As such, this first inconvenience for the Cartesians can hardly form an argument for atomism. The second and third difficulties with which Cordemoy sees the Cartesians faced involve Descartes’ theory of the individuation of physical objects. Descartes’ theory of individuation is complex, but the heart of it involves an appeal to motion. There is no question that motion plays the central role in Descartes’ physics, for if all change and all diversity are explained by appeal to the material parts of an object, and if matter is the same everywhere, “all the properties which we clearly perceive in it are reducible to its divisibility and consequent mobility in respect of its parts” [AT VIIIA 52; CSM I 232]. While Cordemoy will agree that all properties of matter are reducible to the actions of the smaller bodies which constitute them, he sees Descartes’ material plenum as leading to serious problems for his account of how particular bodies are individuated. Motion is defined in Part II, article 25 of The Principles as “the transfer of one piece of matter, or one body, from the vicinity of the other bodies which are in immediate contact with it, and which are regarded as being at rest, to the vicinity of other bodies” [AT VIIIA 53; CSM I, 233]. Yet with regard to the question of how we are to understand “one body” or “one piece of matter”, we are told, in the very next sentence, that by these terms is meant “whatever is transferred at a given time” [AT VIIIA 54; CSM I 233]. Thus an individual is defined as that portion of matter which moves together, from one neighborhood of other bodies to another. This would seem to make Descartes’ argument circular, in that it defines motion in terms of an individual physical object’s change in spatial relation to other bodies, and then defines an individual physical object as what is in motion.34 34 For further discussion of this circularity, see Prendergast 1972, 68-9; and Garber 1992, 175-81.


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But this circularity is not Cordemoy’s complaint;35 rather, the second inconvenience concerns the inability of the Cartesian position to account for the individuation of a thing at rest. For the Cartesians, Cordemoy says, a body at rest between two other bodies which are touching it could not be a distinct body: According to their doctrine, we cannot conceive of a body at rest between other bodies, because supposing that it is touching them, this doctrine [of Descartes’] teaches that it, together with them, makes only one body. Yet it seems to me that we have a very clear and very natural idea of a body perfectly at rest between other bodies, where nothing is in motion, and what I say of each body accords perfectly well with this idea. (CG 99)

If motion is what individuates a body, and all three bodies are touching and at rest, would we not be forced to say there is only one body present?36 That we can form a clear notion of one such body (i.e., the middle one) distinct from the other two shows, Cordemoy believes, that there is something amiss with the Cartesian picture. Thus motion alone is insufficient to individuate bodies.37 35 Schmaltz (2002, 10) disagrees: “Cordemoy charged that there is a circularity in Descartes that derives from the fact that he defined motion in terms of the transference of individual bodies but also held that bodies are individuated by their transference or motion.” While I agree that Cordemoy saw problems with Descartes’ theory of the individuation of material bodies, it is not clear that this apparent circularity was recognized by him. 36 There is at least one passage in which Descartes admits that, in a sense, this is true; in explaining the thought behind his Fourth Rule of Collision (viz., that a motionless body can never be moved by a smaller body, regardless of how fast it is moving), Descartes tells Clerselier that “by ‘motionless body’ I mean a body which is not acting so as to separate its surface from those of other bodies surrounding it, and which consequently forms part of another hard body bigger than it” (AT IV 187; CSMK III 248; my emphasis). 37 Of course, another option for Descartes—an option not considered by Cordemoy—is to hold that all bodies are in motion. But if this is the route Descartes would take, he is faced with an equally (if not more) significant problem. As Garber has discussed (1992, 179), Descartes’ laws of impact are derived from the distinction between those bodies which are at rest and those which are in motion. Without having any bodies at rest, bodies cannot be thusly distinguished, and without the distinction, we cannot


While Cordemoy is critical of the Cartesian account of the individuation of bodies, he does not offer a theory of his own. But this is because given his atomism, the problem of individuation, at least as a Cartesian problem, does not arise—the only true physical individual things in the world are imperceptible, indivisible, extended bodies. All assemblages are ‘bodies’ only in the non-technical sense. These bodies are individuated functionally, with the result that one such thing can be composed of other assemblages which themselves can be considered separate things.38 Unfortunately, however, Cordemoy does not offer any further thoughts on the individuation of or the identity criteria for complex organisms. The third inconvenience with which Cordemoy sees the Cartesians as being faced also has to do with motion: what do we say, according to the Cartesians, of a body which has one part of it forced in one direction and another part pushed in another? As their motions are different according to Descartes’ own definition of motion—the parts are changing with respect to which other bodies are in their vicinity—it would seem that according to the Cartesian account that we now have two bodies: [I]f we believe that a body, being a portion of matter, ought to be divided as soon as its extremities are changed in different directions, it will follow that when neighboring bodies push it in different spots and along opposing lines, they will divide it in as many ways as it is pushed. (CG 99)

We seem to have as many bodies as we have parts being pushed in different directions (as happens to a flag being blown in the wind, for example). Cordemoy’s claim is that once again the Cartesian position would appear to violate the clear notion we have of that thing as a single body. It would be surprising if Descartes had not considered such problems with his account of individuation in terms of motion, for surely it would not have escaped his attention that the various smaller parts of get the laws. Garber (1992, 177-8) also considers, and then rejects, the possibility that Descartes had in mind a center of gravity of the body’s parts when he spoke of ‘what is transferred at the same time’. 38 Cf. Spinoza’s example in Ep. 32 of the worm in the bloodstream (Spinoza 1995, 193).


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a larger body might have motions different from each other. In fact, in §31 of Part II of The Principles he discusses the many simultaneous motions a particular object can have, specifically “where it is a part of other bodies which have other motions.” He offers the following as an example: [I]f someone walking on board ship has a watch in his pocket, the wheels of the watch have only one proper motion, but they also share in another motion because they are in contact with the man who is taking his walk, and they and he form a single piece of matter. They also share in an additional motion through being in contact with the ship tossing on the waves; they share in a further motion through contact with the sea itself; and lastly, they share in yet another motion through contact with the whole earth… (AT VIIIA 57; CSM I 236)

Note that this example does not address the same problem which Cordemoy raised; here the issue is not (what we would want to call) one object with various parts in different motions. Rather, the issue is which frame of reference we should adopt in determining a thing’s proper motion. First, it must be said that Descartes’ answer to the question he himself has raised is hardly satisfying: “it is not easy,” he tells us, “to have an understanding of so many motions all at once, nor can we have knowledge of all of them. So it is enough to confine our attention to that single motion which is proper to the motion of each body” (ibid.). The trouble with this response is that we cannot know what motion is proper to a body until we have individuated that body, but we cannot do that until we have distinguished the respective proper motions. Beyond this, though, Cordemoy’s objection remains: we want to know why the watch and the man, for example, are the individuals. Why are not the legs of the man or the second, minute, and hour hands of the watch the bodies to which a motion is proper? Or going in the other direction we can ask why it is that the man is considered an individual, and not just part of a larger individual, like a branch is part of a tree? In the Fourth Set of Replies, Descartes writes that “a hand is an incomplete substance when it is referred to the whole body of which it is a part; but it is a complete substance when it is considered on its own” (AT VII 222; CSM II 157). While


this distinction between complete and incomplete substances may at first seem helpful to our present concern, it too leaves open the question of at what level—body, arm, forearm, hand, finger, nail, etc.—we can legitimately say of a portion of extension that it is an individual body. One way for Descartes to go at this point—a way suggested by the passage from the Fourth Set of Replies just cited—would be to make the concept of an individual body completely relative, putting all bodies at the status of modes of what one could claim is the one corporeal individual, viz., the indefinitely extended substance itself.39 Further support for this interpretation can be found in the Synopsis to The Meditations, where Descartes writes that “we need to recognize that body, taken in a general sense, is a substance, so that it too never perishes” (AT VII 14; CSM I 10).40 But such a Spinozistic conception of the material world would be difficult to reconcile with Descartes’ ontology as explicitly stated in The Principles and elsewhere.41 Modes are states of a substance, and so if bodies are taken to be modes, motion and rest, shape, hardness, etc., would be modes of modes, or states of states; from a Cartesian perspective, it would be hard to make sense, metaphysically speaking, of a mode possessing modes.42 39 Lennon (1988, 53-56; 1994, 13) takes this route, as does Gueroult (1953 vol. I, 107-118), though for different reasons. In the seventeenth century, Desgabets was perhaps closest to this position in his interpretation of Descartes. For more on Desgabets on this issue, see Easton 2002, 2034. 40 There is, of course, an ambiguity in the phrase “taken in a general sense”. 41 For further criticisms of this view of bodies as modes, see Hoffman 1986, 347-349. He notes not only that “Gueroult does not cite a single passage where Descartes says that bodies are modes to offset the passages where Descartes says they are substances” (348), but adds further that “Descartes seems committed to denying that bodies are modes, since he says that bodies are parts of matter and denies that modes are parts” (349). 42 This said, it must be pointed out that there is at least one passage in which Descartes does allow for modes of modes. In a 1641 letter sent to Mersenne to forward to Hobbes he claims that “there is no awkwardness or absurdity in saying that an accident is the subject of another accident,” as for example is the case, according to Descartes, with the determination of motion (AT III 355; CSMK III 178). But if bodies are taken as modes, determination becomes the mode of a mode of a mode of a substance.


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On the other hand, one may be inclined to go the other direction, and attribute to Descartes the view that individual bodies are each substances in their own right. There is ample textual support for such a view; for example, in the 19 January 1642 letter to Gibieuf, Descartes writes that “I consider the two halves of a part of matter, however small it may be, as two complete substances” (AT III 477; CSMK III 202-3). In addition, there is also the remark in the Third Meditation in which Descartes declares that he thinks that “a stone is a substance, or is a thing capable of existing independently” (AT VII 44; CSM II 30). But despite these passages, as well as others which lend themselves to a reading of individual bodies as substances,43 we are left with Descartes’ firm view that any body is infinitely divisible. Not only, then, could Cordemoy repeat his claim that a body’s status as a substance is threatened by our attribution of parts to it, but Descartes himself is at a loss to say what level constitutes such a substantial body without returning to the circularity issue discussed above.44 Considering the two passages just cited together, the stone is a substance, but if it is split, the two parts are now substances (making the original stone in fact two substances joined together?). Yet regardless of the ontological status of individual bodies in Descartes’ ontology, it would seem that with his second and third inconveniences, Cordemoy has revealed issues which pose serious trouble for the Cartesian account of individuation of physical bodies by appeal to motion. Cordemoy concludes his discussion of these inconveniences by posing the question of material divisibility in terms of a dichotomy: It is necessary that each body is divisible or that it is not. If it is divisible, its nature cannot remain as it is, and I have shown that we cannot explain either movement or rest. On the other hand, if it is not divisible, we can very easily explain what appears to us concerning rest and motion. (CG 102)

For Cordemoy, the choice appears obvious: atomism allows us to account for motion and rest, which are fundamental to Cartesian 43 See also the Sixth Set of Replies (AT VII 433; CSM II 292); and The Principles Part II, §55 (AT VIIIA 71; CSM 246). 44 For other difficulties with this interpretation of individual bodies as substances, see [Rodis-] Lewis 1950, 39-51.


physics in that all (physical) change is explained in terms of them, while Descartes’ plenum theory cannot do so. Before concluding this section, there is one other matter I wish to consider. As we have seen, accounting for motion and rest is important to Descartes for, among other reasons, accounting for the individuation of (what we, in a non-technical sense, call) bodies. Descartes thought that he could explain their individuation while at the same time holding to the indefinite divisibility of matter; Cordemoy’s claim is that he cannot. In other words, it is only by accepting atomism, and specifically an atomism which takes bodies/atoms as extended substances in the Cartesian sense, that Cordemoy thinks we can provide an account for the individuation of aggregates of such bodies/atoms. Thus, given what has been said to this point, I think that Balz somewhat misses the point when he writes: In the continuity of matter, when defined as one substance the essence of which is extension, there is no room for the differentiation of one thing from another, and so no separation of things. And without this separation neither motion nor rest is intelligible.45

The problem is not so much that without an account of individuation of material things we cannot account for motion and rest, but that given the assumption of one infinite (or indefinite) material substance whose essence is extension and which is indefinitely divisible, Descartes is driven to appeal to motion and rest in order to individuate material things, and this leads to the problems raised by Cordemoy above. If the Cartesian account of motion is thus insufficient to account for the individuation of bodies, what is needed is an appeal to something outside of motion; for Cordemoy, we appeal to atoms, les corps. Now it is true that as Descartes’ definition of motion in The Principles II, 25 relies upon the concept of individual physical objects and their change in spatial relations to other bodies, the lack of an adequate account of individuation leads directly to trouble for his definition of motion and further trouble for any physics (such as Cordemoy’s) which explains all change in terms of changes in motion. But it is neither the inability to explain motion and rest nor the inability to account for the individuation of physical bodies which are Cordemoy’s moti45 Balz 1951, 9.


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vations for rejecting Descartes’ material plenum—these are ‘merely’ problematic consequences of it. Rather, Cordemoy’s central argument results from his analysis of the concept of substance itself, in particular the requirement that a substance be indivisible.

IV. Reactions

The reader may have noted that there has been to this point no mention made of ancient atomists such as Democritus or Epicurus, and only very little said of the great seventeenth-century French atomist Gassendi46 in the above discussion of Cordemoy’s atomism.47 This 46 Despite that fact that both were atomists, Gassendi rejects the Cartesian dualism embraced by Cordemoy. For the former, it is the complex arrangement of the matter which composes our bodies which allows for thought. Interestingly, Cordemoy claims that differences among humans in abilities to understand is the result of structural differences in peoples’ brains. I will return to this matter in Chapter Four. 47 While Prost (1907, 61-2) claims that “ce n’est pas un tel atomisme qui pouvait inspirer Cordemoy” and Clatterbaugh (1999, 98) refers to Cordemoy as “the only Cartesian atomist,” there are at least two other seventeenth-century philosophers who are occasionally referred to as both ‘atomist’ and ‘Cartesian’, the Oratorian Fromentier and the Minim Maignan. Fromentier’s thought is known primarily from the report of his censure (in Babin 1679), which was imposed for his teaching of views properly considered Cartesian as well as those clearly non-Cartesian, including atomism, which he maintained could not be proven wrong (Prost 1907, 182). For more on him and his censured positions, see Ariew 2002. It is worth noting that although Fromentier is censured for (among other things) teaching atomism, Ariew claims that he, like Descartes, “formally rejected atomism” (60). More is known about Maignan, whose chief philosophical work, his Cursus philosophicus (first published in 1653), was influential not only within his Order in France, but in Spain as well. Yet if he is more clearly an atomist than was Fromentier, he is decidedly less clearly a Cartesian. Not only did he reject Descartes’ plenum (though unlike Cordemoy, for empirical, rather than a priori, reasons), he criticized, among other things, Descartes’ views on light, magnetism, and the Eucharist. Perhaps most significantly, Maignan did not believe that a thinking substance was necessarily immaterial (and thus not necessarily immortal). On both his influence and the question of his Cartesianism or non-Cartesianism, see Whitmore 1967, 163-186; and Israel 2001, Chapter 28. For more on his thought in general, see also Grant 1981, 174-78. All of this makes Ross’ statement (Cordemoy 1972 [1668], vii) that “there were many other Cartesians who shared Cordemoy’s opinion,


is for the good reason that Cordemoy himself makes no reference to other atomists. Despite his break with Descartes and the Cartesians on the issue of the divisibility of matter, Cordemoy’s argument for his physics—viz., that the concept of substance requires it have no parts into which it can be (naturally) divided—is entirely a priori, and the empiricism of Gassendi would have been unacceptable to his Cartesian-inspired rationalism. But this did not stop others from associating him with Gassendi; one of Cordemoy’s earliest critics was Dom Robert Desgabets, who chastised Cordemoy for, knowingly or not, ‘giving aid and comfort’ to the enemies of Cartesianism, the Gassendists. We will begin with his criticisms, and then turn to those of some other Cartesians. Desgabets, like Cordemoy, was a friend of Descartes’ literary executor Claude Clerselier, who in 1666 sent to Degabets a copy of the Discernement. Shocked by Cordemoy’s endorsement of atomism, Desgabets replied with his Lettre écrite á M. Clerselier touchant les nouveaux raisonnements pour les atomes et le vide contenus dans le livre du discernement du corps et de l’âme (1666). His chief concern seems to be a worry that a Cartesian’s support for atomism will appear as a concession to the Gassendists; Cordemoy, he says: without thinking clearly [creates] a schism which is all the more considerable in that it all at once takes away one of the strongest supports from the true philosophy and strengthens notably the side of Monsieur Gassendi, which has already only too much the appearance of supporting itself and of overcoming that of Descartes, although it may be the only philosophy from which the world can receive a general reformation.48

which was a preference for the use of the term ‘matter’ as a collective or general expression of an assemblage of bodies or atoms” very puzzling. Her claim that Rohault in particular was a follower of Cordemoy’s atomism is simply false; while he does make some modifications to Descartes’ physics, Rohault explicitly argues against both atomism and the existence of a void (see note 21 supra). Finally, for the argument that Cordemoy’s “originalité est incontestable,” see Prost 1907, 54-62. 48 Quoted in Prost 1907, 158. The original manuscript is in the library at Epinal.


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While he himself would make modifications and adjustments to develop his own brand of Cartesianism,49 Desgabets clearly thinks Cordemoy has gone too far in arguing for atomism and the existence of a void. In addition to this general accusation of a betrayal of the one true philosophy (viz., Cartesiansim), Desgabets does attempt to refute the arguments Cordemoy employs for atoms and the void. Atomism, he claims, results from a confusion concerning infinite divisibility: “in order to believe in the divisibility to infinity, it actually requires some very subtle reasoning, and the supporters of the atoms did not have this.”50 Their mistake, he goes on to say, was the failure to note that distance can only inhere in an extended substance, and as such, for any extended substance—including these allegedly indivisible atoms—God (at least) could always divide that distance, to infinity. Desgabets does commend, in a way, Cordemoy for (unlike Epicurus, Lucretius, and Gassendi and his followers) devising “very subtle metaphysical considerations” rather than merely “physical reasons proving the existence of atoms and the void”.51 But if his arguments are stronger, they are still not convincing to Desgabets, who distinguishes between the formal point of view and the material point of view. The former considers something as it is essentially, in terms of its definition, while the latter considers it as it exists in the world. For example, a watch, formally considered, is a device that tells time, while materially considered it is an extended body. With regard to bodies, formally speaking they are indivisible, inasmuch as “all essences, natures and metaphysical forms are indivisible.”52 But materially speaking, as long as one holds that atoms take up space in the world, no matter how small they are, the different regions of the atom are distinct from one another, and if they are distinct, they are separable by God. On a strict Cartesian reading—and it is unclear that Desgabets himself was concerned with putting his response to Cordemoy in conformity with a strict Cartesian reading—the point seems to be this: 49 For more on Desgabets’ Cartesianism, see Schmaltz 2002. For more on his critique of Cordemoy’s atomism, see Clair and Girbal’s introduction to Cordemoy 1968, 39-40 and their notes, ibid., 305-6. 50 Quoted in Prost, 159. 51 Ibid., 160. 52 Ibid., 161.


while Desgabets speaks of “all essences,” there is only one essence of body, namely extension, and one essence, thought, of the one other type of substance, minds.53 Formally speaking, as a substance, body, Cordemoy is correct in saying, cannot be divisible for the reasons he gives: if a substance had parts it would depend on those parts in a way that would threaten its status as a substance. But materially speaking, as spatially extended bodies in the physical world, bodies must have different parts—different points on their surface, for instance. As we can distinguish between these parts, and as anything which we can distinguish in thought is separable by God, any body, no matter how small, can be divided. If this is Desgabets’ argument, it is puzzling that when he turns to Cordemoy’s first inconvenience, he appeals to the mathematical conception—that is, takes the formal point of view—of body. “Geometers,” he writes, “know very well what they are saying when they demonstrate that the continuum is divisible into parts which are further divisible and so on without finding an end.”54 This point alone is sufficient, Desgabets states, to refute the first inconvenience. As we saw, Cordemoy’s argument (or better, complaint) against the Cartesian indefinite/infinite distinction only goes through if one first presupposes atomism. The issue which Desgabets’ remark raises is the one previously discussed, namely what Descartes himself held to be inconceivable about infinite divisibility, for it will be recalled that it is this putative incomprehensibility (to human minds, at least) that leads us to properly refer to matter as indefinitely divisible rather than infinitely divisible. Thus it would seem Desgabets’ point could be addressed to Descartes as equally as to Cordemoy. Turning to the second and third inconveniences, Desgabets claims that while a body is in motion, its relation to other bodies changes and this is how that body is individuated. When a body is at rest, even though its relation to other bodies is now fixed, it maintains that original distinction which it had when in motion. His position, he says, can be easily understood: 53 It is true that Desgabets held that there are what he called “modal essences,” which are the essences of particular bodily modes, but he maintained that these essences are (somehow) contained in the essence of extension. 54 Ibid., 166-7.


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by the comparison to an army, which is in fact only a mass of soldiers, some of which are at rest and others of which are in motion, and where one can imagine an infinity of orders, ranks, leaders and underlings, files, battalions, etc., all of which things taken formally depend on the manner in which we consider them, although all that does not prevent each soldier from being a particular man, distinct from all the others.55

As with Descartes’ example of the hand as an incomplete substance with regard to the body but a complete substance in itself, Desgabets’ example suggests that the notion of an individual can be taken relatively. While we may at times refer to an individual platoon, for example, this doesn’t mean that each soldier making up the platoon is not an individual in his or her own right. But as with Descartes, we are here left with the trouble that any portion of matter, it would seem, can be considered an individual in itself. If a particular soldier can be conceived of as an individual, so can his right arm, his right hand, his right thumb, the top joint of the right thumb, the right thumb nail, etc. (or, to take Descartes’ own example, the stone or the two halves of the stone). If the notion of an individual is going to have any meaning, there must be a criterion by which we distinguish individuals from non-individuals. As we saw, Descartes’ criterion individuates according to that which moves together in relation to surrounding bodies. So, for example, a person’s right thumb nail, which is once a single individual, may become two—a right thumb nail and a nail clipping—if the nail is cut and the clipping falls to the floor. But now we are back to the circularity discussed above: we appeal to motion to individuate bodies while at the same time appealing to individuated bodies to define motion.56 For Desgabets, arguments against atomism apply with equal force against the existence of the void, in that he sees the existence of atoms and the existence of a void as implying each other. Still, when he turns to the void, he does not merely repeat his earlier arguments 55 Ibid., 167. 56 As mention previously (see footnote 39 supra), Desgabets took individual bodies to be modes rather than substances or parts of substance, and thus appears to be in a better position than Descartes (that is, if Descartes himself did not take individual bodies as modes) with regard to the charge of circularity.


against atomism. His first criticism of those who accept the existence of a vacuum is that they beg the question: their ‘proof ’ is that when asked if it is possible to remove all the matter from a room and still have the walls keep their same distance from each other, they say they can imagine that God could accomplish this. From the claim that this could happen, says Desgabets, they conclude that there is a void.57 Now regardless of whether anyone in the seventeenth century argued for the void in this way, it is not, as we saw, Cordemoy’s argument. The walls need not collapse and touch, not because we can imagine God preventing it, but because each body (i.e., each atom composing the walls) is metaphysically independent of all other bodies, and what one body does has no logical (i.e., necessary) implications for another body. According to Desgabets, not only is the existence of a void a contradiction—a nothing that is—a nothing could not have any properties, including distance.58 If the claim is that between two given points A and B there is only empty space, what is the length of the distance between the two points a length of, if nothing can have no properties?59 A void would seem to be, then, a metaphysical impossibility. But if this is so, why are some misled into thinking there not only could be, but actually is a void? The mistake, thinks Desgabets, is in part due to an over-reliance on the senses, something which Cordemoy himself had warned against. This error has its origin “in the strongest, and consequently the most excusable, prejudices our childhood and in the propensity of our mind, from the start of our life, [viz.,] to judge that the things which are not perceived by the external senses are nothing at all.”60 Since we do not see any matter between A and B, we assume there is none: “from our entrance into this life, we have continually seen extended rooms and extended country sides where, nonetheless, we believe there is nothing there because the air filling them was not sensible.”61 This error, then, is not one that Cordemoy alone has fallen 57 Ibid., 169. 58 Ibid., 170. 59 While Cordemoy never responded to Desgabets, the Benedictine would seem with this point to have raised an important question for anyone holding atomism grounded upon a Cartesian metaphysics. 60 Ibid., 171. 61 Ibid.


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into, but is the mistake made by anyone tempted toward belief in the existence of a void. Despite the way things appear to us, we must, Desgabets warns, withdraw from our senses and realize that if there were truly nothing between the two walls, they would necessarily be touching. Beyond this uncritical acceptance of the way the senses represent the world to be, Desgabets finds that some people also mistakenly accept the possibility of a void as a result of confusing an abstraction of the imagination with reality. This begins, he says, when our minds quite naturally form ideas of genera, species, and other universals. The error comes when: after becoming accustomed to these mental abstractions, we imperceptibly fall into the idea of real abstractions, imagining there to be genera and species beyond individuals, and then establishing eternal essences, uncreated and incorruptible, much as some metaphysicians conceive human nature in itself, and these famous ideas that we attribute to Plato. The same thing was done with regard to extension.62

So, while there exist only individual humans, we have the ability to abstract from our experiences of them to form a general idea of ‘human nature’; the mistake is to reify this abstraction into something such as a Platonic Form. Likewise, there exists only the extended substance which we experience, and the void is the general idea of space (devoid of matter) which we can form via abstraction. Again, the error is to make this abstraction into an actually existing universal.63 Another prominent Cartesian critic of Cordemoy was Pierre-Sylvain Régis. Unlike Desgabets, Régis does not go through Cordemoy’s arguments one by one. Rather, he faults atomists in general for a failure to 62 Ibid., 172. 63 Prost claims (1907, 174) that this passage is such a modification of Descartes’ philosophy that Descartes himself would never have accepted it on the grounds that extension is not only an essence for Descartes, but it is prior to individual bodies. Perhaps this is so: Descartes does hold that extension as the true and immutable essence of body is distinct from actually existing bodies. Yet he also clearly held that the essence of a substance and that substance of which it is an essence are distinguished only by reason. For more on this question, see Lennon 1993, 142-3.


carefully distinguish between ‘body’ and ‘quantity’.64 The former is, as a substance, indivisible, while the latter is always divisible. The chief error of the atomists is to fail to note that quantity is only accidentally a property of body, inasmuch as quantity is related to the size of a body. Size—being of some quantity or other—is, unlike quantity, an essential property of body, in that it follows from the concept of extension itself: anything extended has the property of being sized. But while an extended thing must necessarily be of some size, it is not essential to it being of this or that particular size, that is, of this or that quantity. Quantity is only “nothing other than a determination of size,” that is, “size considered as such or such.”65 For this reason, one can always divide a given quantity, such division being, as said, essential to the very concept of quantity. With regard to the question of atoms, Régis’ claim is that to divide a body—not just its quantity, but the body considered in itself, as substance—would, strictly speaking, be to change its essence.66 Thus while the quantity of a body can be divided, its size—its being some quantity or other—is still present as part of the essence of both resulting bodies. Régis’ remark that the above distinction is directed at showing the error of those who “maintain, following Epicurus, that atoms are indivisible because they are substances”67 would indicate that he had Cordemoy in particular in mind, for as was argued above, this is exactly the reasoning behind his acceptance of atomism. Régis’ point is that dividing the quantity of a body has no implications for the status of body as substance, since it is size and not quantity which is essential to body, and in the division of quantity, neither size nor anything essential to body is altered. But while this understanding of body and quantity is decidedly more Cartesian than Cordemoy’s understanding, that in itself would hardly be enough for Cordemoy to feel himself refuted, only (once again) in departure from a more standard Cartesian position. It simply comes down to differing metaphysical presuppositions: for Régis quantity is an accidental property 64 For the argument that Cordemoy is not guilty of confusing these concepts, see Battail 1973, 88. 65 Régis 1690, 280. 66 In that “all division brings some change to the divided thing” (ibid., 282). 67 Ibid.


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of body, while for Cordemoy it is not a property of body at all, but of matter. Jacques Rohault was another Cartesian who, as we saw, rejected the existence of a vacuum. While he doesn’t refer to Cordemoy in particular, it is interesting to note that he recognized, it would seem, the force of metaphysical atomism as opposed to physical atomism. In the first place, when discussing the example of God removing all of the air from the room, he is careful to distinguish what is possible given God’s omnipotence (which, he says, we are not in a position to decide, but we certainly wouldn’t want to deny absolutely that God could create a void) from the question of what we think would happen if God removed all the air from the room. Rohault thinks the answer to this question is clear: as matter is removed, the two sides would approach each other. What is interesting is that he clearly understands Cordemoy’s point about the metaphysical independence of substances: It is very true, that the Existence of the Walls does not depend upon what is constrained between them; but the State they are in, or the Disposition of them, in order to compose a room, this depends upon Extension, or some Matter which is between them, and consequently, this Extension cannot be destroyed without destroying the Disposition which the walls were in before, though not the walls themselves.68

The bodies of which the walls themselves are composed do not depend on anything external to be what they are—what changes is the relation, the accidental relation, between the walls. The relation between them—that they are at such and such a distance from each other—is a purely modal relation, and therefore its change does not threaten the ontological status of the bodies which make up the wall. One final critic to be considered is Gottfried Leibniz, whose views on Cordemoy’s atomism are found in his correspondence with the Cartesian Antoine Arnauld. Leibniz had met Cordemoy during his stay in Paris (1672-76), but the discussion with Arnauld concerning 68 Rohault 1969 [1723], 28.


Cordemoy’s philosophy did not begin until 1686. In a letter from late 1686, Leibniz tells Arnauld: I recall that M. Cordemoy, in order to preserve substantial unity in bodies in his treatise about the discrimination between the soul and the body, thought himself obliged to admit atoms, or indivisible bodies possessing extension, so that he could find some regular basis for the creation of a simple entity; but you were right, Sir, in thinking that I would not share this view. It appears that M. Cordemoy had recognized some part of the truth, but he had not yet seen wherein lies the true concept of a substance, and moreover it is there that the key to the most important knowledge is to be found. If man contains only a figured mass of infinite hardness (which I consider as no more consistent with divine wisdom than the void), he cannot in himself embrace all past and future states, and still less those of the whole universe.69

In other words, Cordemoy’s fault is that his atoms are not Lebnizean monads.70 Of course, Cordemoy could respond that it is Leibniz, not he, who has the faulty concept of substance—why, he can fairly ask, must we conceive of man as composed such that he can “embrace all past and future states,” as well as “the whole universe”? (Leibniz’s answer: we must do so because substance is—as Cordemoy himself argues—independent of all other created substances, and as such is a world unto itself.) Moreover, Cordemoy could rightly point out that he in no way claims that man is only a figured mass of infinite hardness; man is a union of an immaterial thinking soul with an aggregate of bodies. Leibniz makes clear his differences with Cordemoy when he writes (9 October 1687) to Arnauld: I believe rather that everything is full of animate bodies, and to my mind there are incomparably more souls than there are atoms for M. Cordemoy, who makes a finite number of them, whereas I maintain that the number of souls or at least of forms is quite infinite, and 69 Leibniz 1967, 96. 70 Though according to Mouy (1934), Leibniz “transposera, du corporel au spirituel, ‘l’atomisme de Cordemoy” (102).


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that since matter is endlessly divisible, one cannot fix on a part so small that there are no animate bodies within…71

As before, Leibniz does not point to specific errors in Cordemoy’s argument for atomism, but only claims that Cordemoy’s metaphysics are incompatible with his own. Cordemoy’s argument for atomism, while not explicitly stated as such, is an appeal to the very nature of substance, together with the claim that a body’s divisibility would threaten its status as a substance, thus understood. The three inconveniens are, on the view presented here, not Cordemoy’s reason for adopting atomism, but are rather further advantages which he feels atomism has over the Cartesian plenum theory. Finally, the leading opponents of Cordemoy seem primarily to oppose his position for the fact that it conflicts with Descartes’ physics or implications of Descartes’ physics, or that it cannot be shown to follow from Cartesian (or Leibnizean) principles. In the next chapter, we will look at another issue on which Cordemoy parted with some of his fellow Cartesians, but, as we will see, this time he had more company in doing so.

71 Leibniz 1967, 151-2.

3 Cordemoy and Occasionalism

I

Cordemoy’s adoption of atomism makes him unique among Cartesians, he has more company when it comes to his acceptance of occasionalism, the doctrine that God is the one true efficient cause in the world. While he, Malebranche, and Geulinx were the most thorough-going occasionalists of the period, there were other important Cartesians who adopted at least some of the elements of the occasionalist model: Arnauld, Clauberg, and La Forge all appealed to occasionalism to explain some form of causal interaction in the created world. We will begin this chapter with a look at Cordemoy’s argument for occasionalism as found in the Discernement. I then want to turn to the claim made by Henri Gouhier (and accepted by Clair and Girbal, as well as others) that Cordemoy’s argument was the source of one of Malebranche’s three arguments for occasionalism, specifically, his argument based on continuous creation. In assessing this claim, we will need to spend time examining the doctrines of both continuous creation and divine conservation. Next we will take a look at the f

Freddoso 1991 offers a fuller definition of occasionalism: According to occasionalism…God alone causes effects in nature; natural substances, contrary to common opinion, make no genuine causal contribution at all to any such effect. In short, there is no creaturely or ‘secondary’ causation in nature; created substances are incapable of transeunt action, i.e., action that has effects outside the agent. So, for instance, the gas flame on your stove does not heat the kettle of water placed over it; rather, it is God alone who heats the water on the occasion of its being proximate to the flame. The flame counts as a ‘cause’ only in the attenuated sense that God acts in accord with a firm, though arbitrarily decreed, intention to heat water when it is brought into proximity to a gas flame of a given type under a given range of circumstances; and so it is for all the effects produced in nature. (553-4) For the varieties of occasionalism held by Cartesians of this period, see Nadler 1993b, esp. 72-3.


objections to Cordemoy’s occasionalism put forth in the anonymous Lettre à un cartésien. It will also be important to examine (what little there is on) Cordemoy’s attempt to incorporate human freedom (and human responsibility and culpability) into his occasionalism. Finally, I will discuss what Balz has claimed to be an argument from analogy to support occasionalism in Cordemoy’s Discours Physique de la parole (1668).

I. The Argument from the Discernement

The Fourth Discourse of the Discernement du corps et de l’âme en six discours contains an explicit argument for body-body occasionalism which is based on a Cartesian understanding of the metaphysical relation between substances and their modes. Cordemoy lays out five axioms from which he draws four conclusions, the final of which is that God alone is the source of the commencement and continuation of the motion of all bodies in the world. Let me first simply state the definitions, axioms and conclusions and then turn to a discussion of each of them: Definitions

1. The cause of the motion of bodies is nothing else than that which moves the bodies. 2. Having motion is nothing else than to be moved. Axioms 1. One does not have of oneself that which could be lost without ceasing to be that which one is. 2. All bodies are able to lose their motion, up to the point of not having any, without ceasing to be bodies. 3. We are only able to conceive of two sorts of substances, Minds (which think) and Bodies. This is why one ought to think of them as the causes of all that happens; and that which does not come from one comes from the other. 4. To move, or to cause motion, is an action. 5. An action cannot be continued except by the agent who initiated it. Conclusions I. No bodies have motion of themselves. Proof: By the first axiom, one does not have of oneself what one is able to lose without ceasing to be what one is.

3• Cordemoy and Occasionalism

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Now, by the second, all bodies are able to lose their motion without ceasing to be bodies. Thus no body has motion of itself. II. The first mover of bodies is not a body. Proof: If the first mover of Bodies were a body, it would follow that one body had motion of itself. Now, by the first proposition, no bodies have [that power] of themselves. Thus, the first mover of Bodies is not a body. III. It can only be a mind which is the first mover. Proof: By the third axiom, there are only two kinds of substances, Body and Mind; & whatever does not belong to one must necessarily be attributed to the other. By the second proposition, a body cannot be the first mover. Thus, it can only be a mind which is the first mover. IV. It can only be the same Mind which initiates the motion of Bodies which continues their motion. Proof: Supposing that, following the 4th Axiom, moving bodies is an action, & that, following the 5th, the same action can only be continued by the agent who commenced it: it can only follow that, if a mind initiated the motion of bodies, the same mind must continue them. By the 3rd proposition, it is a mind which initiated the motion of bodies. Thus it can only be the same mind which continues to move them. (CG 135-7)

We see Cordemoy begins his argument by first laying down as an axiom that nothing can lose something “of itself ” (de soy) without ceasing to be what that thing is. Put another way, nothing can lose an essential property and remain the same thing that it was. Given that bodies can lose their motion without ceasing to be bodies (Cordemoy’s second axiom), that is, that motion is not an essential property of bodies inasmuch as a body not in motion is still a body, it follows


that bodies do not possess motion of themselves (first conclusion). It is also the case, according to Cordemoy, that one body cannot be the source of movement in another body. This claim appears neither as one of his five axioms nor as one of the four conclusions, but rather appears to be based on the Cartesians’ understanding of motion as a mode, or state, of a body, and not, as the Scholastics would have it, a quality distinct from that body. Given that a mode cannot exist distinct from the substance of which it is a mode (save by an act of reason), “the state of a body is not passed to another” (CG 138); motion (that is, the same motion) cannot be transferred from one body to another any more than a body can, for example, transfer its shape to another body. From all this, Cordemoy takes as his second conclusion that the first mover of bodies cannot be a body (for if it were, then it would have motion of itself, which no body does). Considering now the third axiom, viz., that there are only two substances, bodies and minds, together with the second conclusion that the first mover cannot be a body, by elimination the first mover must be a mind (third conclusion). Further, as it is not our—or any finite—minds which move bodies, it can only be God who is the first cause of motion. That it cannot be our minds which are the source of motion in bodies is evident, Cordemoy believes, for several reasons. First, he notes both our inability by an act of our will to effect certain actions of the body (e.g., circulation—I cannot will the blood to stop flowing in my arm) and the fact that for various reasons (e.g., injury, old age) our bodies are not always responsive to our will (e.g., a paralyzed man cannot will his legs to walk). He also says, in anticipation of Malebranche and later Hume, that restricting ourselves to experience, we observe only temporal succession between our willing something at one moment and our body acting the next—we never observe a causal connection: “many, seeing that as soon as they will a part of their body to be moved in a certain direction it immediately goes there, imagine themselves, because of what they do not perceive” to be the cause (CG 140). Finally, Cordemoy claims that if our will were an active cause of the motion of bodies, the quantity of motion in the world would fluctuate as we will bodies to move, thus disturbing God’s plans for the conservation of motion and God’s simplicity. Cf. Arnauld and Nicole 1964 (originally published in 1662): “If not in motion, a body cannot give itself motion” (324).


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This final argument is more important for Cordemoy’s case than it may initially appear. The first reason does not rule out the efficacy of the volitions of finite beings altogether: because I cannot cause certain effects does not imply that I cannot cause any. So too, the second reason says that finite beings may not be the causes of the observed effects, not that they are not. To arrive at occasionalism, Cordemoy needs something like Malebranche’s “no necessary connection” argument, Geulinx’s (and Malebranche’s) epistemological requirement (both of these are discussed below), or this third reason. So, taking the conclusions established thus far—that bodies do not have motion of themselves, that no body moves another, and that only a mind can be the first mover of bodies—and adding to them Cordemoy’s fourth and fifth axioms, viz., to move or to cause motion is an action, and an action cannot be continued except by the agent who initiated it—we arrive at the fourth conclusion, that only the first mover of bodies, God, can continue their motion. These arguments for body-body occasionalism go on to form the basis of Cordemoy’s thorough-going occasionalism. As with his argument against the plenum theorists, Cordemoy again faults his opponents, i.e., those who believe beings other than God are causally efficacious, for relying too heavily on sense experience: When we say, for example, that body B drives body C away from its place, if we examine well what is acknowledged for certain in this case, we will only see that body B was moved, that it encountered C, which was at rest, and that since this encounter, the first ceased to be moved [and] the second commenced to be. But if we recognize that B gave some of its motion to C, that is truly only The grounds for taking the latter as an axiom are from Descartes’ Third Meditation and will be discussed in detail below. In the Fifth Discourse Cordemoy will say that “when we will have closely examined what is found in the action of a body on a body, we will not find it to be any more conceivable than that of minds on bodies” (CG 150). It is worth noting that nowhere in his argument is reference made to any specific problem of mind-body interaction; while the ‘traditional’ view has it that occasionalism was adopted by those who adopted it as an ad hoc solution to the Cartesian problem of mind-body interaction, Lennon (1974) and Nadler (1997) have convincingly shown that this was not the case. I will return to this matter in the final section of this chapter.

60 Fred Ablondi~Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian a prejudice which comes from what we do not see when these two bodies [encounter each other]; & that we are in the habit of attributing all the effects which are known to us to the things we perceive, without being aware that often these things are incapable of producing such effects, and without considering that there could be a thousand causes which, completely imperceptible as they are, can produce the sensible effects. (CG 137)

Reason, on the other hand, reveals, as Cordemoy believes his argument to have shown, that neither bodies nor finite minds can be the true cause of the motion of any body.

II. Malebranche’s Arguments

In Book VI: Part Two, Chapter III of The Search after Truth (1675), Malebranche presents two arguments for occasionalism (though arguments similar to these two appear elsewhere in his work). The first, more familiar to students of seventeenth-century thought, states that true causality requires a necessary connection between cause and effect: Now it appears to me quite certain that the will of minds is incapable of moving the smallest body in the world; for it is clear that there is no necessary connection between our will to move our arms, for example, and the movement of our arms. It is true that they are moved when we will it, and thus that we are the natural cause of the movement of our arms. But natural causes are not true causes; they are only occasional causes that act only through the force and efficacy of the will of God…(OC II 315; LO 449)

Inasmuch as this necessary connection between volition/cause and action/effect obtains only in the case of the Divine will, Malebranche That this anticipates Hume’s analysis of causation is worth noting. Consider also Arnauld and Nicole (1964): “If we argue that since one event occurs after another then the latter event must be the cause of the former, we commit the sophism in the form called post hoc ergo propter hoc” (255). In The Search After Truth (1675) Malebranche will make a similar remark: “[M]en never fail to judge that a thing is the cause of a given effect when the two are conjoined, given that the true cause of the effect is unknown to them” (OC I 426; LO 224).


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concludes that our volitions are only the occasions for God, as omnipotent, to exercise his efficacious will to produce the effect. The second argument is epistemological in nature. It claims that in order to be the true cause of an effect one must know how the effect is produced. As we do not know, down to the finest details, what occurs physiologically when we will our arm to move, for example, we cannot be the true cause of the arm’s motion: For how could we move our arms? To move them, it is necessary to have animal spirits, to send them through certain nerves toward certain muscles in order to inflate and contract them, for it is thus that the arm attached to them is moved; or according to the opinion of some others, it is still not known how that happens. And we see that men who do not know that they have spirits, nerves, and muscles move their arms, and even move them with more skill and ease than those who know anatomy best. Therefore, men will to move their arms, and only God is able and knows how to move them. If a man cannot turn a tower upside down, at least he knows what must be done to do so; but there is no man who knows what must be done to move one of his fingers by means of animal spirits. How, then, could men move their arms? (OC II 315; LO 449-50)

Again, the conclusion is that it is God who, as omniscient, is alone capable of producing the effects we will. It is worth noting that while secondary literature on Malebranche often notes that this second argument can be found in Geulinx as well (impossibile ut id faciat qui nescit quomodo fiat, as Geulinx frequently put it), Cordemoy may well have been Malebranche’s source. In the Fifth Discourse he writes that “our souls do not know the changes in matter [of our bodies] when they happen, and they [i.e., our souls] can receive new thoughts by the movement of the body, according to the relation and the dependence that God established between them” (CG 148). Malebranche has a third argument which appears in both the Elucidations of the Search After Truth and in the Dialogues on Metaphysics. The general idea can also be found in Descartes, who wrote to Regius (in May 1641) that “we cannot will anything without understanding what we will” (AT III 372; CSMK III 182). For more on Malebranche’s arguments for occasionalism see Nadler 2000.


This one is premised on the doctrine of continuous (re-)creation, i.e., the thought that God is needed not only to bring the world into existence, but to keep it in existence at each moment, and that He accomplishes this by continuously creating the world. In the more often cited passage from the Dialogues Malebranche writes: God wills that a certain kind of world exist. His will is omnipotent, and this world is thus created. Let God no longer will there to be a world, and it is thereby annihilated. For the world assuredly depends on the will of the creator. If the world subsists, it is because God continues to will its existence. Thus, the conservation of creatures is, on the part of God who acts, nothing but their continued creation. I say on the part of God who acts. For on the part of creatures there appears to be a difference, since by the act of creation they pass from nothingness to being, whereas by the act of conservation they continue to be. But in essence the act of creation does not cease, because, in God, conservation and creation are but a single volition which, consequently, is necessarily followed by the same effects. (OC XII 156-7; JS 112)

How, exactly, do the above remarks figure into an argument for occasionalism? Malebranche continues: Creation does not pass, because the conservation of creatures is—on God’s part—simply a continued creation, a single volition subsisting and operating continuously. Now, God can neither conceive nor consequently will that a body exist nowhere, nor that it does not stand in certain relations of distance to other bodies. Thus, God cannot will that this armchair exist, and by this volition create or conserve it, without situating it here, there, or elsewhere. (OC XII 160; JS 115)

The thought suggested by this passage is that if God is in effect recreating the world at one moment with a certain body in a certain place, and then a moment later re-creates the world with that body in another place, it is He who is the true cause of what we see as the


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motion of the body (motion being for Cartesians, as we saw in the last chapter, a change in vicinity with respect to other bodies). While it is true (as will be discussed in detail below) that accepting God’s conservation of the world need not imply continual creation on God’s part, and while it is also the case that accepting God’s continual creation does not imply one hold to a literal recreation at each moment,10 a passage from Elucidation One suggests that Malebranche understood divine conservation in just this way: For I believe it certain that conservation is but continual creation, for it is but the same will of God, who continues to will what He has willed, and this is the general view among theologians. A body, for example, exists because God wills that it exist, and He wills it to exist either here or there, for He cannot create it nowhere. And if he creates it here, is it inconceivable that a creature should displace it and move it elsewhere unless God at the same time wills to create it elsewhere in order to share His power with His creature as far as it is capable of it? (OC III, 26; LO 551-2; my emphasis)

The analogy to a strip of film is perhaps helpful in understanding this interpretation of continual creation: while each frame of the film is a ‘still’, containing no motion, the succession of frames from moment to moment gives the perception of motion.11 For arguments that challenge much of this traditional interpretation of Malebranche’s use of the doctrine of continual creation, see Pessin 2000. In particular, he denies Nadler’s claim that the argument from continual creation is “Malebranche’s most powerful and sweeping argument for God as the sole causal agent in the universe” (Nadler 2000, 126); Pessin also claims that “something must clearly be added to continuous creation…if we’re to derive occasionalism” (430). 10 There is a good deal of debate over whether Descartes, who as we shall see explicitly holds that God’s creation of the world and his conservation of it are distinct only in reason, was committed to a literal recreation of the world at each moment. For some of the key texts in the debate, see Gueroult 1984 vol. 1, 193-202; Beyssade 1979; Garber 1992, 266-73; and Des Chene 1996, 314-30. 11 It would seem that the same would apply to the existence of a mind over time, as well as the existence of its modes. For more on this issue, see Lennon’s commentary on The Search (LO) 810 ff.; Clatterbaugh 1999, 117-119; Pessin 2000; and Pyle 2003, 43-46 and chapter nine.


Gouhier has claimed12 that this third argument for occasionalism has its source in Cordemoy’s argument in the Fourth Discourse, and the great historian of seventeenth-century French thought Bouillier went so far as to refer to Cordemoy as the first occasionalist.13 Taken without qualification,14 Bouillier’s claim is certainly false: occasionalism can be found in Islamic philosophy as far back as al-Ghazali in the eleventh century.15 In addition, though medieval philosophers such as Nicholas of Autrecourt,16 Gabriel Biel, and Peter d’Ailly17 were not explicitly occasionalists, their philosophies all contained elements with which occasionalists would agree. There is also the question of the degree to which, if any, Descartes himself was an occasionalist.18 As for Cordemoy himself, he does speak explicitly of created substances, both bodies and finite minds, as being “able to be only the occasion” of movement (CG 92) in the Preface of the Discernement, and in the Fourth Discourse he says that “when we want to say why 12 See Gouhier 1948, 54. 13 See Bouillier 1868 vol. 1, 516. 14 Bouiller himself is careful to say “le premier en France.” 15 It is interesting to note that al-Ghazali and his fellow Asharites were, like Cordemoy, also atomists. For more on him and Islamic occasionalism, see Fakhry 1958; Lennon 1985, esp. 283-87; and Nadler 1996. 16 For Autrecourt, see Nadler 1996. 17 While d’Ailly, like Autrecourt and Malebranche, believed there was no necessary connection between any cause and effect in the created world, he did not accept occasionalism; he, and Biel after him, understood secondary causes to be genuine causes, while at the same time holding that this fact derives from God’s will alone. On d’Ailly see Courtenay 1971 as well as Lennon 1998, 356-7. Malebranche does write in Elucidation XV that “with the possible exceptions of Biel and Cardinal d’Ailly, all those I have read think the efficacy that produces effects comes from the secondary cause as well as the primary” (OC III 243; LO 680), but it is not at all clear that Malebranche should have counted them as allies. 18 In his Treatise on Man (written in the early 1630’s though not published until 1664), Descartes speaks in several places of causes which “give occasion”. See AT XI 144; CSM I 103 and AT XI 176; CSM I 106, as well as AT XI 164. The question of Descartes’ occasionalism is discussed in Garber 1987; Garber 1992; Garber 1993; Nadler 1994; and Clatterbaugh 1995. Clatterbaugh 1999 and Pessin 2003 argue for Descartes’ acceptance of concurrentism, the doctrine that God concurs with the causal activities of secondary causes, making those causes genuine causes; such a view is obviously incompatible with occasionalism.


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a certain body which was at rest begins to be moved, we content ourselves to explain it [by saying that] it has met another body which was moving,” but this, he says, is only “the occasion for the cause” (CG 139). This said, however, it must be remembered when considering this matter of priority that Louis de La Forge was developing his own arguments for occasionalism at the same time as, though independently of, Cordemoy,19 and was, according to Gouhier, the first Cartesian to employ the phrase “causes occasionnelle”.20 In addition, the German philosopher Johannes Clauberg has also been taken by some as the first Cartesian occasionalist, but there are reasons to question this.21

19 Jacques Gousset, an acquaintance of La Forge’s, claimed that La Forge was the first occasionalist, Gousset having discussed La Forge’s philosophy of causality with him as early as 1658. Gousset’s claim is discussed in depth in Claire 1976. For more on La Forge’s occasionalism, see Prost, Chapters VI and VII; Nadler 1993b; and Nadler 1998a. I will return to his argument for occasionalism below. This question of priority is further complicated by the fact that Cordemoy tells us at the beginning of the Fifth Discourse that he had been discussing his theory of occasionalism with his friends for seven or eight years, that is, since 1658 or 1659, the same time that Gousset says that La Forge adopted the doctrine. Claire (1976) thinks, against Prost, that it is very unlikely that Cordemoy and La Forge were in contact with each other at that time, given that La Forge did not visit Paris, where Cordemoy lived. 20 Gouhier 1926, 89. The phrase appears in Chapter X of La Forge’s Traité de l’esprit de l’homme (1665). 21 Remarks in Clauberg’s Corporis et animae in homine conjunctio (1664 [1968]) seem prima facie to appeal to occasionalism to explain mind-body interaction, though Bardout 2002 presents a strong argument that careful examination of the text reveals that Clauberg takes secondary causes to be fully efficacious. See also Prost 1907, 151-5; Balz 1951, 158-94; and Spruit 1999, 78-9. (Prost actually suggests that Clauberg might well have been the source for the occasionalism of both Geulinx and La Forge.) In his earlier De cognitione Dei et nostri (1656/1968), Clauberg makes use of the doctrine of continuous creation to argue for our total dependence on God, though he does not see that this appeal commits one to occasionalism, as La Forge and Malebranche later would. It is also interesting that Clauberg sees continuous creation as following from Descartes’ very definition of substance in Principles I, §51 as that which depends on nothing else for its existence. For Clauberg’s use of the doctrine of continual creation in the De cognitione Dei et nostri, see Garber 2000.


Ascertaining the accuracy of Gouhier’s remark requires, on the other hand, close examination. It appears in a footnote to the following quote from Malebranche’s Réponse á une Dissertation de M. Arnauld: Supposing that the conservation of beings is only their continuous creation, which seems to me evident, I prove in general that no creature is able to act on bodies through its own efficacy. (OC VII 514)22

Gouhier’s note to this reads: “This deduction comes from Cordemoy, the author of the Discernement de l’âme et de corps”.23 The grounds for this claim would appear to be Cordemoy’s Fifth Axiom, that “an action can only be continued by the agent who initiated it” (136). Gouhier had also in an earlier work read Cordemoy as employing an appeal to continuous creation: He evokes the creator God, that is to say, the God who does not cease creating the world, and he understands the universal cause is thus always present as cause: the metaphysical demonstration of the true cause is achieved.24

In their commentary on the Fourth Discourse, Clair and Girbal write with regard to Axiom Five that “if this agent is God, the theory [is] the ‘continuous creation’ of Descartes”.25 Gueroult echoes this, saying that the Fifth Axiom “implies without doubt continuous creation”.26 And Battail writes that for Cordemoy, “God is at the same time first mover and constant mover: He is the God of Descartes who recreates 22 Malebranche (not quoted by Gouhier) continues: “It is clear that the action by which God conserves creatures is the same by which they are created, and their conservation is only their continuous creation, because it is the effect of a will which subsists always the same.” 23 Gouhier, 1948, 54. 24 Gouhier 1926, 101. 25 Notes to Cordemoy 1968, 320. 26 Gueroult 1959 (vol. 2), 211. He does argue that the axiom alone isn’t enough for continuous creation, but requires in addition the Cartesian position that motion is a state of a body, and as such cannot be transmitted to another body.


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the world at each instant.”27 I do not think, however, that the case is quite so clear as these authors suggest. To begin with, on the issue of the doctrine of continuous creation having its roots in Descartes, the relevant texts are found in Part II of the Principles. Descartes concludes §36 by claiming that “God imparted various motions to the parts of matter when he first created them, and now he preserves all this matter in the same way, and by the same process by which he originally created” (AT VIIIA 62; CSM I 240). §42 contains the second part of Descartes’ proof for his third law of motion (on collision); the law, he says, “is proved from the immutability of the workings of God, by means of which the world is continually preserved through an action identical with its original act of creation.” He continues: For the whole of space is filled with bodies, and the motion of every single body is rectilinear in tendency; hence it is clear that when he created the world in the beginning God did not only impart various motions to different parts of the world, but also produced all the reciprocal impulses and transfers of motions between the parts. Thus, since God preserves the world by the selfsame action and in accordance with the selfsame laws as when he created it, the motion which he preserves is not something permanently fixed in given pieces of matter, but something which is mutually transferred when collisions occur. (AT VIIIA 66; CSM I 243, my emphasis)

There is also an important passage in Meditation III, where Descartes claims that: it does not follow from the fact that I existed a little while ago that I must exist now, unless there is some cause which as it were creates me afresh at this moment—that is, which preserves me. For it is quite clear to anyone who attentively considers the nature of time 27 Battail 1973, 132 (my emphasis). He goes on to say that “à l’atomisme de la matière doit venire s’ajouter chez Cordemoy un atomisme du temps,” but he then adds that “on peut regretter que traitant de problèmes aussi profonds que celui de causalité et celui de la creation continuée, il n’aborde guère cette question centrale du temps et de ses rapports avec l’instant et l’èternitè” (ibid.). Of course, one explanation for why Cordemoy does not take up the question would be that he does believe that God “recreates the world at each instant.”

68 Fred Ablondi~Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian 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 if it were not yet in existence. Hence the distinction between preservation and creation is only a conceptual one. (AT VIII, 49; CSM II 33, my emphasis)28

Here Descartes explicitly states that God’s preservation of creation from moment to moment is accomplished via continual creation, that is, via a creation “afresh” at each moment. It is true that according to his Fifth Axiom (and subsequent considerations), Cordemoy, like Descartes, holds that God is the causal agent who continues all motion in the world from moment to moment, as he is the one who began it.29 But did Cordemoy think that this is done by continual creation, as Gouhier, Clair and Girbal, Gueroult, and Battail believe? There is among theistic philosophers a long-standing, widely held doctrine of divine conservation, but many have held this without subscribing to either continuous creation or the occasionalism which Malebranche (and, as we shall see, La Forge) took continuous creation to entail.30 Where did Cordemoy stand on 28 Quinn (1988) explains the conceptual distinction in this way: “We speak of creation in the case in which divine volition brings about the existence of a creature at a time and that instant of time is one prior to which there is no other at which that creature existed; and when we speak of conservation in the case in which divine volition brings about the existence of a creature at a time and that instant of time is one prior to which there are others at which that creature existed” (54). Some might take continual creation to imply that it is, strictly speaking, a new creature created at each instant, which would be to deny that that creature (or any creature so conserved) persisted or even acted; for an argument that this need not follow from continuous creation, see Quinn 1983. A route not considered by Quinn is a version of four-dimensionalism which would allow us to say that while I am not wholly present at any instance, I—the individual Fred Ablondi—am the mereological sum of all of these time-slices, and can thus be said to act and to persist in a meaningful way. 29 It is not just the motion of bodies which requires God’s causal activity: Cordemoy writes in his Discours Physique de la parole (though the line only appeared in the first three editions) that “our souls depend on [God] for their being and their conservation” (CG 255). 30 Since there are those such as Malebranche and Descartes who (more or less) equate divine conservation or divine preservation with continual creation, I will from this point forward use the term ‘divine conservation’


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this question—would he have agreed with Malebranche’s claim that the conservation of beings is only their continuous creation?31 Book Six, Part Two, Chapter Three of Malebranche’s Search After Truth, where two of his arguments for occasionalism appear, contains a passage that is striking in its similarity to the section from Cordemoy’s Fourth Discourse discussed above; I have noted Cordemoy’s axioms and conclusions in brackets: It is clear that no body, large or small, has the power to move itself [Conclusion One]. A mountain, a house, a rock, a grain of sand, in short, the tiniest or largest body conceivable does not have the power to move itself. We have only two sorts of ideas, ideas of minds and ideas of bodies [Axiom Three]; and as we should speak only of what we conceive, we should only reason according to these two kinds of ideas. Thus, since the idea we have of all bodies makes us aware that they cannot move themselves [Conclusion Two], it must be concluded that it is minds which move them [Conclusion Three]. But when we examine our ideas of all finite minds, we do not see any necessary connection between their will and the motion of any body whatsoever…But when one thinks about the idea of God, i.e., of an infinitely perfect and consequently all-powerful being, one knows there is such a connection between His will and the motion of all bodies, that it is impossible to conceive that He wills a body to be moved and that this body not be moved. (OC II 312-3; LO 448). to refer to the doctrine that God’s causal activity is required for the world to exist at each instant that it does, but that this is not accomplished by (any version of ) continuous creation; I will use ‘continual creation’ to refer to the doctrine that accepts divine conservation, and that this conservation is achieved by God continually recreating the world. 31 Nadler (1998a) writes that “by the seventeenth century, the distinction between God’s initial act of creation and God’s subsequent causal activity as conserver has generally disappeared, and divine conservation of the world and its contents becomes identified as a kind of continuous creation” (217). If this is so, then Cordemoy, as a seventeenth century philosopher, would have likely believed in continuous creation (in that the Fifth Axiom commits him to divine conservation), but then so would any philosopher who accepted the doctrine of divine conservation, and thus there would be no reason to take Cordemoy in particular as the source of Malebranche’s argument.


The last two claims, viz., that it is not our minds but God’s alone which causes motion in bodies, were, we saw, present in the Fourth Discourse as well. But despite the fact that it appears there is good evidence to claim that Cordemoy’s argument had a strong influence on Malebranche, this does not help establish Gouhier’s claim, for the argument here is the ‘no necessary connection’ argument of The Search. It will be recalled that Gouhier’s claim was that it was the argument from continuous creation, found in the Dialogues and Le Réponse à le Dissertation, which has its source in Cordemoy. As said, Malebranche believed that “the conservation of creatures is simply their continued creation,” and that continuous creation implies occasionalism.32 And as the passages cited above strongly suggest, Descartes too believed that the preservation of a creature from one moment to the next just is God’s recreation of it at the later instant. But we are left with the question of whether the Fifth Axiom commits Cordemoy to the same position. Again, many philosophers and theologians have held a doctrine of divine conservation without also committing themselves to continuous creation. In other words, they accept the claim that God is required not just to initially create the world, but to preserve it in existence at each moment at which it exists as well, but they reject the claim that God accomplishes this by continual creation. If Cordemoy falls into this tradition—and the Fifth Axiom would seem not only to be consistent with this understanding of divine conservation but, it could be argued, commits Cordemoy to nothing more—then Clair and Girbal, Gueroult, and Battail are wrong to say that the Fifth Axiom becomes, when God is the cause, “the continual creation of Descartes,” especially if Descartes took continual creation to involve a literal recreation at each moment;33 it would also imply 32 For the question of whether acceptance of continuous creation does in fact imply occasionalism, see Kvanvig and McCann 1988, esp. page 16; Quinn 1988; and Pessin 2000. 33 Given his remark in the Third Meditation about “creating afresh”, there would seem to be grounds for taking Descartes himself to be committed to this stronger version. Such an interpretation seems to be further supported by his claim in that passage that the conservation of an individual requires not only the same power as would be necessary for God to create it anew, but the same action as well, which one could take to mean literal recreation. There is also his remark in Principles Part One, article 21: “Thus, from the fact that we now exist, it does not follow that we shall exist a moment


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that either Gouhier was incorrect to hold that Cordemoy’s argument for occasionalism was the source of Malebranche’s own argument in the Dialogues, or that while Malebranche might have seen Cordemoy as his source for that argument, he was mistaken in doing so. Further, just as there have been philosophers and theologians who agree that God is required both to create the world and to preserve it in existence but reject the view that God accomplishes this by continual creation, so too, as was alluded to earlier, have there been philosophers and theologians who agree that God sustains the world via continuous creation but who deny that this involves literal recreation. Thus we can distinguish a strong version of the doctrine which holds that at each moment the world is literally recreated, and what is created at each moment is, in some sense, novel,34 from a weak understanding, which would hold that things really do persist—we do not have novelty at each moment—but this persistence requires a cause, God, who does the sustaining of the same individual at each instant at which it exists.35 This latter understanding of the doctrine respects Descartes’ ‘only a conceptual distinction’ view of the relation from now, unless there is some cause—the same cause which originally produced us—which continually reproduces us, as it were, that is to say, which keeps us in existence” (AT VIIIA 13; CSM I 200, my emphasis). It is true, however, that the “as it were” (quasi) preceding the “creates me afresh” could be taken to mean this continual reproduction should not be taken literally. See note 17 above for references to the relevant texts in the debate over this question and occasionalism. For more on how God causes motion for Descartes, see Menn 1990 and Garber 1992, 299-305; on motion and the related issue of temporal atomism, see Garber 1987, esp. 570-72 in which the author argues that Descartes is committed to neither temporal atomism nor its denial. Gueroult (1984 vol. 1, 195-99), on the other hand, has argued in favor of Descartes’ holding a temporal atomism; according to him, for Descartes continual creation amounts to “a repetition of indivisible discontinuous creative instants” producing distinct, independent worlds from moment to moment (195). If this is so, occasionalism would seem to follow. 34 That Descartes is committed to this strong version, see Lennon 1985; according to Lennon, for Descartes “strictly speaking there is no continued existence, only the recreation of extension, which though unchanging appears to change” (276). Against this, and in support of Descartes’ holding a concurrentist theory of causation, see Clatterbaugh 1999. 35 From a Cartesian perspective, this would require that God determine all the modes of a substance at each moment. As suggested previously, I


between God’s preservation of the world and God’s creation of the world without holding that this preservation is accomplished by a literal recreation at each instant. It ‘merely’ holds that the power God uses to create and to preserve is the same, not that in preserving God is literally creating.36 I see no reason to take the Fifth Axiom as committing Cordemoy to a strong version of the doctrine; there is nothing in the Axiom as stated that even suggests that God sustains the world by means of literally recreating it at each moment. So, turning to Malebranche, if it is the case that he held the stronger version of continuous creation, then I do not see any reason to take Cordemoy’s Fifth Axiom as the source for the argument in the Dialogues. That Malebranche did hold a stronger version is suggested not only by the Seventh Dialogue and the passage from Elucidation One cited above, but also by the fact that the stronger version also puts one on a shorter, very direct road to occasionalism: such a reading has God creating the world at time t1 with individual a in place x1,y1 ,z1 and an instant later at time t2 creating the world with a now in place (say) x2,y2,z2, and it would be on account of this that Malebranche could argue that God is the true cause of the motion (understood in the Cartesian sense as a change in relation to neighboring bodies) of a.37 But again, if this stronger read the passages from the Seventh Dialogue and Elucidation One as going farther than this. 36 Quinn 1983 defends a position something like this: “For God to create or to conserve an individual at an instant is merely for him at that instant to bring about the existence of the individual at the instant. [It] does not entail or imply that a created individual must begin to exist; [it] only implies that an individual created by God at a time is one whose existence is brought about by God at that time” (70). In the sixteenth century a similar view was held by Suarez, who defines (in Disputation 21, Section 3) what he calls per se and immediate conservation, the kind of conservation by which he believes God preserves the world in existence, as “the persistent inpouring of that very esse which was communicated through the production [of the entity]” (Suarez 2002, 130). 37 Nadler (1998a) disagrees; after citing the passage from Malebranche’s Dialogues which we considered above, he writes that “this understanding of the doctrine of divine sustenance does not imply substances do not persist. It is not the case that, after a momentary existence, they revert to nothing and, hence, at each instant, must literally be recreated by God” (217). I would agree that it is true that continuous creation need not be


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version of continual creation is what Malebranche had in mind, it is very hard to see how Cordemoy could be said to be the source for the argument. Axiom Five says that the initial cause of the motion of a body is required for the continued motion of that body, and subsequent considerations get us God as this initial cause. While Axiom Five is consistent with Descartes’ claim that “the distinction between preservation and creation is only a conceptual one,” the most that it commits Cordemoy to is a doctrine of divine conservation, and not necessarily (and from the text, apparently not at all) continuous creation in the strong sense.38 That the Fifth Axiom signals Cordemoy’s acceptance of a weak version of continuous creation is possible, but not conclusive (inasmuch as it is continued motion and not continued existence that Cordemoy is discussing). Yet if this reading is mistaken and Malebranche did accept what I have called a weak understanding of continuous creation, one which sees God as ‘merely’ sustaining the world via a general volition to sustain bodies (and minds?) and their modes, there is another, independent, reason to doubt Gouhier’s claim that Cordemoy was the inspiration for Malebranche’s third argument, namely, there is a much better candidate for that role. Louis de La Forge’s Traité de l’esprit de l’homme was published in late 1665, a few months before Cordemoy’s Discernement.39 In it, one finds the following: I claim once more that there is no creature, spiritual or corporeal, that can change [the position of a body] or that of any of its parts in the second instant of its creation if the Creator does not do it Himself, as it was He who produced this part of matter in place A. For example, not only is it necessary that he continue to produce it understood in this way, but if this is not how Malebranche understood it, it becomes less clear that he can get the doctrine to do the work he needs it to do for him, viz., get him straight to occasionalism. 38 This is, of course, not to say that Cordemoy will allow, as Suarez does (see note 35 supra), that secondary causes, though requiring God’s concurrence, are truly efficacious. My claim is that Axiom Five, in itself, does not commit Cordemoy to a strong version of continuous creation. 39 Despite being two of the first Cartesian occasionalists, according to Mouy (1934), “tandis que Cordemoy est un hérésiarcque, de La Forge est un scupuleux commentateur” (106). Mouy here must be referring to Cordemoy’s atomism, not his occasionalism.

74 Fred Ablondi~Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian if He wants it to continue to be, but also, since He cannot create it everywhere, nor outside of any place, He must put it in place B if He wants it to be there, for if He were to put it somewhere else, there is no force which would be capable of removing it from there.40

Compare this to Malebranche’s argument in Elucidation One of The Search: I believe it certain that conservation is but continual creation, for it is but the same will of God, who continues to will what He has willed, and this is the general view among theologians. A body, for example, exists because God wills that it exist, and He wills it to exist either here or there, for He cannot create it nowhere. And if he creates it here, is it conceivable that a creature should displace it and move it elsewhere unless God at the same time wills to create it elsewhere…? (OC III 26; LO 552)

Or this passage from the Dialogues on Metaphysics: For even God—though omnipotent—cannot create a body which is nowhere or which does not have certain relations of distance to other bodies. Every body is at rest when it has the same relation of distance to other bodies; and it is in motion when this relation constantly changes…[God] cannot do the impossible, or that which contains a manifest contradiction. He cannot will what cannot be conceived. Thus He cannot will that this chair exist, without at the same time willing that it exist either here or there and without His will placing it somewhere, since you cannot conceive of a chair existing unless it exists somewhere, either here or elsewhere. (OC XII 155; JS 111)

The similarities between the arguments are clear.41 Just as Malebranche would a decade later, La Forge argues from divine conservation to con40 La Forge 1666, 240. 41 Garber (1987) notes, after citing the passage from La Forge quoted above that “a similar argument is found in dialogue seven of Nicholas Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics” (567). Nadler goes further, claiming not only that Malebranche “read La Forge’s Traité with great interest soon after it publication,” but also that “it is highly likely that Malebranche, in his own arguments for occasionalism, was influenced by La Forge” (1998a, 218).


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tinuous creation to occasionalism: as God is required to sustain the world in existence, and as God accomplishes this by re-creating the world at each moment, what appears to us as the motion of a given body from point A to point B is in fact the result of God creating the world with that body at point A at one moment and again at point B at a later moment. Given that there are not grounds for reading Cordemoy’s argument in the Fourth Discourse as implying a strong version of the doctrine of continuous creation, given that Malebranche endorses a strong version of continuous creation, given that Malebranche’s only reference to Cordemoy is an approval of Cordemoy’s treatment of the distinction of the mind and the body (in the Sixth Discourse),42 and given that Malebranche utilized an argument for occasionalism clearly present in La Forge’s Traité, a work Malebranche almost certainly would have read, it seems reasonable to conclude that it is doubtful that Cordemoy was in fact the source of Malebranche’s argument for occasionalism in the Seventh Dialogue.

III. A Letter to a Cartesian

In 1672, a letter addressed to Desgabets and entitled Lettre d’un philosophe à un cartésien de ses amis, appeared.43 Despite the actual addressee, the real target of the letter, given the author’s explicit complaints with Cartesianism and his mention of “axioms,” would seem to have been Cordemoy. The letter’s chief objection to occasionalism is that it constitutes an affront to the very basis of our knowledge, namely, sense experience. For according to occasionalism: when we see that a cannonball from a cannon is carried with violence against a wall, we imagine that the ruin which follows in the wall is caused by the cannonball, but we are clumsily mistaken. It is neither the cannon, nor the powder, nor the cannonball, nor the machine, nor the man, nor an angel, nor any creature imaginable Prost too believes that Malebranche must have studied La Forge closely; see his 1907, 187-89. 42 OC I, 123; LO 49. 43 The letter was anonymous, but thought to be from a Jesuit by the name of Rochon. For further discussion of the letter, see Gouhier 1926, 103-07, as well as Lennon 1974, 29-31.

76 Fred Ablondi~Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian which is capable of shaking a tiny cottage. It is God alone who, on the occasion of the firing, shoots the cannonball and who, on the occasion of the bullet hitting, collapses the wall, which would otherwise remain steady. Likewise, when we want to wiggle a finger, and when that finger wiggles, we think that it is we in effect who wiggle it; but it is an error which wrongs the sovereign domain of God. It is in no way we who wiggle the finger; all created forces are insufficient for that. It is God alone who, following the resolution which he made in the beginning, at the occasion of the act of our will, himself produces this movement in our finger. In a word, it is God who causes all the movements which occur in the world, and all which creatures do is serve God as the occasion for his executing what he resolved to do in such and such circumstances.44

Of course, Cordemoy and Malebranche would happily agree with this account, but Rochon is clearly incredulous, and cites Suarez and St. Thomas as having refuted the occasionalists’ position.45 What is particularly interesting about the letter in the context of the present discussion is that the author sees occasionalism as following from Cordemoy’s Fifth Axiom. Specifically, he understands the axiom as amounting to continuous creation, which (as he sees it) leads in turn directly to occasionalism, presumably for the reasons that La Forge and Malebranche saw it doing so. So having rejected occasionalism, Rochon rejects the axiom which in his mind implies it. He then proceeds to argue for the doctrine of divine concurrence, particularly as it is found in Aquinas and Suarez.46 Divine concurrence holds that while God’s preserving power is needed for the world to exist from 44 Rochon, 83-4. 45 See Suarez 1994, 37-50 and Aquinas 1945, 123-28. 46 For the concurrentism of Aquinas and Suarez, see Freddoso 1991. Interestingly, remarks in Cordemoy’s Traité de Métaphysique suggest concurrentism (though a more limited one than one finds in either Acquinas or Suarez, inasmuch as it applies only to the mind’s causation of its volitions); see esp. Part II, section 7, to which Prost (1907) comments: “Tout développement de notre volonté demande notre consentement. Dieu n’agit en nous que si nous lui en donnons l’occasion; s’il nous incline, il ne nous nécessite pas” (95). It is important for Cordemoy that we play a substantial enough role in producing the effects of what we will in order for us to be held responsible for our sins. I will pursue this matter in the next section.


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moment to moment, secondary causes like you, me, and the billiard ball are also genuine causes of effects in the world. Furthermore, this preserving power is not, pace Descartes, the same as God’s creating power. Created substances do make a real causal contribution to the effect, but only on the condition that God’s causal power is said to concur with them. Obviously, this is at odds with occasionalism, which holds that created substances have no causal power and only provide the occasion for God to exercise His efficacious will.

IV. Human Freedom

Given that God is the true cause not only of causal interaction between bodies, but between mind and bodies, the obvious question arises of how we can in any meaningful sense be said to be free. If my volition to raise my hand, for example, is not the true cause of my hand going up, but only provides the occasion for God’s efficacious will to cause my hand to go up, how responsible am I for my actions? And if my actions are sinful (e.g., I was raising my hand as part of my attempt to steal something), does not this theory make God an accomplice to my sin? One could argue that inasmuch as I have the initial volition, the responsibility is completely mine, and God is merely allowing things to proceed in accordance with the laws of nature which he has decreed. But am I even the cause of my volitions? To say that I am would not only seem to make my will a true cause, in that it determines God to act, but moreover it clearly violates the core belief of Cartesian occasionalism: it makes us the cause of a change in the modes of a substance; a volition is a species of idea, a mode of mind, and so if I am the source of my volitions, I am a true cause. On the other hand, to deny that I am even the cause of the volitions which in turn occasion God’s efficacious will to act leads us to ask how we can be said to be free, and how we can keep from being forced to say that God is responsible for my sinful acts. Now going the first route—holding that we are the true cause of the change in modifications in our minds—is certainly a move open to Cordemoy. As said at the beginning of this chapter, occasionalism was accepted by seventeenth-century occasionalists to varying degrees: Arnauld, for example, appeals to it only to explain how the body is able to effect the mind, while La Forge accepts it only with regard


to body-body interaction. While Malebranche, as thorough-going occasionalist as one finds during this period, has occasionalism govern even mind-mind causality, it is not so clear that Cordemoy is in agreement in this respect.47 The Discernement is silent on the matter, and what we find in the Traité de Métaphysique is too brief to decide the question. What we do find there, however, is quite in line with what Malebranche will later say in The Search and elsewhere. According to Cordemoy, God created us (and conserves us) with a desire for our proper end, namely, the good. Yet we have the freedom—and this is precisely in what human freedom consists—when given a choice of several alternatives to suspend our judgment and consider which of the options are truly good and which merely appear so. Human freedom thus becomes, as it will for Malebranche, a matter of paying attention to what truly will lead us toward our proper end. Cordemoy explains it as follows: V. God urges [minds] incessantly toward [their end]. They have a continual desire for it. They are not even able to refrain from desiring to reach it, and it is because of that, insofar as nothing obscures their understanding and they know perfectly the way to reach there, all the action of their will will tend toward it. But, as soon as their understanding is obscured and diverse things are presented to them whose appearance is such that they do not know how to choose, it is then that they suspend this action. And, although God urges them incessantly toward their end, and even though he urges them to chose certain of these ways which present themselves as going toward this end, as they often do not know how to choose, they remain in suspension, and that is an action. They resolve not to choose and this resolution is an action which truly would not be in us without God but which is their action and not that of God. VI. In what follows, when having deliberated they determine themselves toward one way rather than another, it is still true that 47 The argument for occasionalism from continuous creation lends itself to Malebranche’s view: if God is recreating the world at each moment, he is recreating our minds with the volitions they have just as he is creating bodies in various places. Thus if I am correct in denying continuous creation to Cordemoy, he is able to deny that it is God who causes certain of my ideas to follow from certain other ones.


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without God this determination, which is an action, would not be in them. But it is clear also that this action is not that of God and that it is theirs. (CG 284)

At times, due to the influence of our passions, a false good (e.g., adultery) may indeed appear to us as a good (it will bring pleasure); it is the mind’s duty to consider the matter carefully and to realize what is in fact in our best interests. In cases in which I clearly and distinctly understand the various options, I will either consent to my inclination toward the good in general because I have decided that this particular path is an instance of the general good, or if I understand it to be a false, that is, a merely apparent, good, I will withhold my consent to be moved toward it. Sin, then, becomes a matter of my either assenting to an inclination toward a false good, or my refusal to allow myself to be drawn to what in this particular case is a true good. In either case, the error is a result of my not understanding the particular case clearly and distinctly, and likewise in either case, “if minds have chosen poorly, that is a defect for which they alone are culpable” (CG 285). As said, this is very similar to Malebranche’s treatment of the subject.48 What is important for Malebranche—and perhaps for Cordemoy—is that paying attention does not involve a change in the modes of a mind, but rather is a matter of examining more closely ideas which are already present to it. This suspension of judgment thus can be considered, as Cordemoy calls it, an action, without it making the mind a true cause and thus violating a thorough-going occasionalism. As said, Cordemoy does not give us enough to tell whether he explains human freedom in this way, or whether he limits his occasionalism by not extending it to idea-idea interaction. From what we are given, either route is open for him to take. 48 Compare: “Because the soul is only capable of loving through the natural movement which it has toward the good, it loves infallibly that which seems to have, in the moment in which it determines itself, more conformity with that which it loves invincibly. But it is necessary to suspend its consent…principally with regard to false goods (OC XI, 79). For more on Malebranche’s attempt to reconcile human freedom with occasionalism, see Ablondi 1996.


V. Occasionalism in the Discours Physique de la Parole

Over the last 30 years, several authors have criticized the traditional story that the motivation behind the adoption of occasionalism by seventeenth-century Cartesian philosophers was for it to serve as an ad hoc solution to the mind-body problem. Steven Nadler in particular has gone farther than merely claiming that the traditional story is misleading and that mind-body interaction was not singled out as a particularly significant problem which motivated the adoption of occasionalism; according to him, the mind-body problem was not at all a concern of the seventeenth-century occasionalists: [W]hile Malebranche and others do offer occasionalism to account for the apparent causal relations between mind and body, there is no sense in which their occasionalism was a solution to a perceived specific mind-body problem.49

With reference to Cordemoy in particular he claims that: None [of his arguments] rely on any special inconceivability stemming from the essential unlikeness of mind and body. More generally, there does not appear to be any evidence for the view that Cordemoy was attracted to occasionalism as a solution to the mind-body problem or that he even recognized the existence of such a problem.50

The argument for occasionalism in the Discernement would seem to support Nadler’s claim, for we saw that the mind-body problem in no way figures into it. However, when we turn to Cordemoy’s other major work, the Discours Physique de la parole (hereafter DPP),51 published in 1668, we see that there may be reason to call Nadler’s claims into question. The stated topic of the opening pages of the DPP is what we today would call the problem of other minds: while I can know that I am a thinking thing, how can I be certain that other human beings are 49 Nadler 1997, 78. 50 Ibid., 91-2, my emphasis. 51 As with the Discernement, citations to the Discours will be to Cordemoy 1968.


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as well, that is, how can I know that they are not mere automata (or zombies, in contemporary literature) who behave as if there were clever thoughts behind their seemingly intelligent behavior when in fact there is ‘nobody home,’ so to speak? Drawing upon Descartes’ arguments in Part Five of The Discourse on Method, Cordemoy claims that it is other humans’ use of language—both in its complexity and its creativity—which is sufficient to guarantee to each of us that they have souls, inasmuch as such communication cannot be explained on mechanical principles alone (unlike the sounds produced by parrots and canyons, for example, which can be so explained). This opening discussion on other minds concludes as follows: “Now that it is no longer possible for me to doubt that the bodies which resemble mine are united to souls, and since I am sure that there are other men than me, I think that I ought to look with care at what remains to be known about speech” (CG 209). It is this investigation into the nature of speech which occupies Cordemoy for the remainder of the DPP. To begin with, he tells us that to speak is nothing more than to give signs to our thoughts. He immediately observes, however, that this may seem a bit odd, inasmuch as these signs “bear no resemblance to the thoughts which men join to them” (ibid.). He explains: [W]hether we express our thoughts by gestures, speech, or by [written] characters—which are the three most ordinary types of signs by which we makes our thoughts known—we can clearly see (upon a little reflection) that there is nothing less which resembles our thoughts than what we use to explain them. For when a man, in order to demonstrate to me that he disagrees with me over something, proceeds to shake his head, or to better explain to me moves his throat, tongue, teeth, and lips to form speech, or when he takes some paper and draws some characters for me with a pen, I see so little resemblance between all these motions of the head, the mouth, or the hand and what they teach me that I cannot wonder enough how they so easily give me an understanding of a thing that they represent so poorly. (CG 209-210)

How is it, Cordemoy is asking himself, that air striking my ears in a certain way, for example, can give me knowledge, when the cause and effect are so different in nature? Sound production has a purely


mechanical explanation, while my thoughts cannot be so explained—so how is it that the former can give rise to the latter? Cordemoy doesn’t worry long over this, for he immediately claims that the vast difference in nature between our ideas and the words we use to represent them reveals to us not only the distinction between bodies and souls, but teaches us “the whole secret of their union” as well (CG 210). It is not difficult to see how the difference between words and thoughts sheds light on the distinction between bodies and souls, for it is, after all, just a species of that distinction—matter in motion following mechanistic rules on the one hand and immaterial mental activity on the other. How though, one might ask, does it likewise have anything to tell us about the mind-body union? By way of revealing this secret of which he has just spoken, Cordemoy offers the following analogy: [I]f one conceives that men are able, by means of convention (institution), to join certain motions to certain thoughts, it is not hard to conceive how the Author of nature, in creating the man, unites so well some thoughts of his soul to some motions of his body, and that these motions cannot be excited in the body without thoughts also being excited in the mind. (CG 210)

In other words, just as we are able to connect words to our thoughts, so too does God connect certain of our volitions with certain bodily motions. While both cases involve the joining of two radically different types of things, Cordemoy seems to be saying that the fact that we join words with ideas sheds light on the fact that God joins our volitions to bodily motions.52 Is this intended to serve as an argument from analogy for occasionalism? Albert Balz, for one, thinks that it is. According to him, this analogy is “a first step towards Occasionalism.” He explains: Finding neither in nature as mechanism nor in man as spirit an explanation of the union of the two in the human being, appeal is made to God. God effects a union of antithetical things. The 52 Gouhier (1926) describes the analogy thusly: “la volonté de Dieu a attaché les pensées aux movements corporals comme la volonté des hommes attaché des mots aux choses” (102).


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Author of Nature joins movements and thoughts as man artificially joins thoughts and signs.53

So, pace what was said earlier against the traditional story, if Balz is correct, providing a solution to the mind-body problem played a significant role in Cordemoy’s attraction to occasionalism. There is one other text from the DPP which is relevant in this context. In the paragraph following the passage at which we have just looked, Cordemoy discusses the allegedly analogous roles which humans and God play in their respective ‘joinings’ of things of different natures: “It is evident that it is from this necessary relation, which the Author of nature maintains between the body and soul, that comes the necessity of making signs in order to communicate our thoughts” (CG 210). This is a different claim than what the analogy was purported to show: God’s causal activity with regard to mind-body interactions is not said to be like our use of language, but the source of our ability to communicate. The relations are not presented as analogous, but rather in terms of dependence: the claim is that it is the necessity of God’s causal activity required for mind-body relations from which comes the necessity of using language in order to express our thoughts; it is because God must exercise his causal power in order for minds and bodies to interact that we must likewise create an artificial system of signs if we are to communicate our thoughts to one another. But just how does this work—in what way is the necessity of God’s activity a source for the necessity of our activity? Two possible answers present themselves. Perhaps the claim is that because God created the world as he did, that is, as consisting of two distinct substances with mutually exclusive attributes, his causal activity is required for there to be mind-body interaction, and because this is how God created the world, our activity is, in a like way, required for there to be communication via language. While it is arbitrary or conventional which sounds we associate with which ideas (just as the particular physiological mechanisms God chose by which the body conveys information to and receives information from the soul are conventional), because of their distinctly different natures, words and thoughts require humans to join them. But of course, there is something of a paradox here, and that brings me to a slightly different 53 Balz 1951, 14-5.


interpretation of Cordemoy’s remark. The paradox is this: Cordemoy has claimed that just as men join words to thoughts, so too God unites bodily motions to our volitions. But if the latter is the case, it is not we who join the words to thoughts at all, but God who in fact does it, for producing motions of the tongue, teeth, lips, etc. on the occasion of our wishing to express a thought is just an instance of mind-body interaction, which the analogy claims is effected by God. In other words, if the analogy succeeds, it fails. So perhaps this is what Cordemoy meant by saying that God’s activity being necessary for there to be mind-body interaction is the source of it being necessary that we join thoughts to words—it’s the source because, given occasionalism, God’s doing it all! Either way, however, it is not clear that this passage helps us with the question of whether Nadler or Balz is correct concerning the question of whether explaining mind-body interaction motivated Cordemoy’s acceptance of occasionalism. As for that question, my own opinion is that the answer lies somewhere in between their positions. On the one hand, I think Balz is incorrect in taking the analogy in the DPP as Cordemoy’s “first step toward Occasionalism” and also wrong to further say that Cordemoy was drawn to occasionalism because it allowed him to “escape from this difficulty”54 of explaining both the union of and the interaction between immaterial souls and extended bodies. In the first place, there is the fact that the Discernement, in which we saw that the argument for occasionalism made no mention of a mind-body problem, appeared two years before the DPP. There is no evidence that Cordemoy saw his argument of 1666 somehow lacking at the time the DPP was published. In fact, in the closing pages of the DPP he will again claim that God is the sole active cause at work in the world, but rather than restate his earlier arguments or offer any new ones, he simply directs the reader to the relevant pages of the Discernement, where the argument focuses on the motion of bodies and is only later expanded to include all causality in the created world, including, inter alia, causal interaction between the mind and body. While the joining of disparate entities by humans on the one hand and God on the other is similar, this is not, I maintain, an argument from analogy for occasionalism, 54 Ibid., 14.


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and fails to clearly demonstrate that solving the mind-body problem was what attracted Cordemoy to occasionalism. But I also believe that Nadler is not entirely correct, specifically in that he goes too far when he writes that “there does not appear to be any evidence for the view that Cordemoy…even recognized the existence of [a mind-body problem]”. Recall the context in which the analogy is offered: Cordemoy was not trying to explain to the reader how language relates to our thoughts by appealing to the way in which God unites the mind and the body. Rather, it was just the opposite; his claim was that the convention by which humans are able to join “some exterior movements and our thoughts is, to those who take care to consider it, the best way of conceiving in what the union of body and soul truly consists” (CG 210). So, pace Nadler, Cordemoy did note, if not a “special inconceivability” (Nadler’s phrase), at least a not insubstantial challenge to the mental abilities of some to comprehend. It is by consideration of the sign-language relation that Cordemoy thinks that those troubled by mind-body interaction as a metaphysical problem facing dualism can come to understand its solution. Moreover, it is clear from the texts considered in this chapter that Cordemoy believed that God’s activity is required not only for body-body interaction but for mind-body interaction as well. While the analogy in the DPP may not constitute an argument from analogy for occasionalism, it is intended to serve as something of an elucidation as to how mind-body interaction is effected. Let me conclude this section by again saying that I agree with the arguments made by Lennon and Nadler that occasionalism was not, as the traditional view would have it, accepted by certain Cartesians primarily (or even at all) because it provided them with an ad hoc solution to the mind-body problem. But we must be careful; I do think that it is going too far to say that the problem of Cartesian interaction went unrecognized by them. Cordemoy saw that causal interaction between two essentially distinct substances could indeed prove to be a stumbling block to would-be Cartesians (as Princess Elisabeth, for one, had shown to be the case). His appeal to God as the efficient cause of the movements of the body on the occasion of my volitions is, to be sure, an extension of the occasionalism which he accepted in the case of body-body interaction. In fact, in the Discernement he claims


that once we consider the matter carefully, we will see that mind-body interaction is no more difficult a problem to conceive than is the action of one body on another. But the DPP indicates that Cordemoy realized that while God’s divine intervention is required for all causation alike, the case of mind-body causation can be for some, at least on the face of it, a special problem requiring further explication and attention. While Cordemoy may or may not have been the first Cartesian to adopt occasionalism, it is clear from the above discussions that his thoughts on causation are both original and influential. Though it was argued that he was likely not the source for Malebranche’s third argument for occasionalism, he very well could have been the source of Malebranche’s first two. Cordemoy’s occasionalism was far more welcome among his fellow Cartesians than was his atomism, and we should be careful not to forget the originality and significance of his philosophical insights.

4 Cordemoy and Cartesianism

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which Cordemoy’s thought takes from both Descartes and most, if not all, other Cartesians with regard to his atomism, and given his occasionalism (a doctrine which Descartes never explicitly embraced), it might seem that we should question describing Cordemoy as a Cartesian at all. In this final chapter, I want to look closely at several areas of Cordemoy’s thought which are very much in keeping with Descartes’ own philosophy. At the same time, we will also want to take care, for given his atomism, his belief in the existence of a void, and his thorough-going occasionalism, Cordemoy’s acceptance of Descartes’ various positions will always be nuanced. iven the dramatic departure

I. Motion and Rest

While the First Discourse contains, as we saw in Chapter Two, Cordemoy’s most anti-Cartesian position, namely, his arguments for atoms and the void, the Second and Third Discourses find him situating that atomism in a most Cartesian of physics. For example, Daniel Garber has written that “the most important mode matter has for Descartes is motion, local motion, and it is in terms of this mode that all properties bodies have are to be explained,” and this primacy afforded the role of motion is evident in Cordemoy’s physics as well: the Second Discourse, “On the Motion and Rest of Bodies,” contains as a subtitle “That no change occurs in matter which cannot What Schmaltz has written of Desgabets could equally be said of Cordemoy; according to Schmaltz, “for Desgabets, Cartesianism is not a fixed position that can simply be extracted from Descartes, but rather a work in progress that starts with Descartes’ insights but that subjects his views to revision and correction” (2002, 11). See Mouy (1934): “L’atomisme de Cordemoy est méchaniste et, sur ce point, Cordemoy est cartésien. Le 2e et le 3e Discours exposent son méchanisme” (103). Garber 1992, 156.


be explained by local motion” (106). Let us first look once more at Descartes’ thoughts on motion, and then compare that understanding with Cordemoy’s in the Second and Third Discourses. We first see Descartes’ dissatisfaction with the Aristotelian definition of motion as early as his Rules for the Direction of the Mind, written in or just before 1628. In Rule Twelve he writes: Again, when people say that motion, something perfectly familiar to everyone, is ‘the actuality of a potential being, in so far as it is potential’, do they not give the impression of uttering magic words which have a hidden meaning beyond the grasp of the human mind? (AT X 426; CSM I 49)

By the time of his writing Le Monde (as stated earlier, a posthumously published work with which the Second Discourse first appeared, in 1664) a few years later, he not only distinguishes his understanding of motion from that of the Schoolmen, but goes further and rejects the various species of motion posited by them: The philosophers also posit many motions which they think can take place without any body’s changing place, like those they call motus ad formam, motus ad calorem, motus ad quantitatem (‘motion with respect to form’, ‘motion with respect to heat’, ‘motion with respect to quantity’) and numerous others. For my part, I am not acquainted with any motion except that which is easier to conceive than the lines of the geometers—the motion which makes bodies pass from one place to another and successively occupy all the spaces which exist in between. (AT XI 39-40; CSM I 94)

This line of thought is present in Descartes’ mature work as well. In Principles II, 24 he writes: “By ‘motion’, I mean local motion; for my thought encompasses no other kind, and hence I do not think that any other kind should be imagined to exist in nature” (AT VIIIA 53; CSM I, 233). Though as we saw in Chapter Two, Descartes’ understanding of motion in The Principles did change from what he gives us in the passage from Le Monde: motion is no longer defined in terms of change of place, but in terms of the body’s changing relation to other bodies in its vicinity, that is, a change in neighborhoods of bodies. For more on this move, see Garber 1992, Chapter Six.

4• Cordemoy and Cartesianism

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For the claim that this one motion is sufficient to explain all change, we need to turn to the preceding section (§23): The matter existing in the entire universe is thus one and the same, and it is always recognized as matter simply in virtue of its being extended. All the properties which we clearly perceive in it are reducible to its divisibility and consequent mobility in respect of its parts, and its resulting capacity to be affected in all the ways which we perceive as being derivable from the movement of the parts. If the division into parts occurs simply in our thought, there is no resulting change; any variation in matter or diversity in its many forms depends on motion. (AT VIIIA 52-3; CSM I 232; my emphasis)

Cordemoy would have to make some minor changes to the preceding passage before he could agree with it: matter, strictly speaking, is not everywhere the same, rather it is bodies, the atoms, which are, and it is not their extension which makes this so, but the fact that they are all simple substances (for a substance, according to Cordemoy, must be simple to be a substance). But that all change which occurs in nature is the result of changes in local motion is something with which he certainly agrees, and the Second Discourse sets out to demonstrate that it is indeed local motion which alone accounts for the changes in assemblages of les corps. In addition, Cordemoy also agrees with Descartes in holding that rest is not properly conceived of as a privation of motion, as the scholastics would have it, but as a real quality—the opposite quality—of motion. As we saw in the previous chapter, the cause of motion and rest is not treated until the Fourth Discourse; in the Second Discourse, the focus is on the nature of motion and rest. Cordemoy’s initial definitions of these concepts are quite similar to Descartes’ own definitions cited above. Rest, Cordemoy maintains, “means nothing else than that a body is always in the same location” and motion, “suivant la regle des contraires,” is taken to mean that the body “is transported so that it does not remain for a single moment in the same location” (CG 106). The one noteworthy difference between Descartes and Cordemoy See Le Monde, Chapter Seven (AT XI 40; CSM I 94). On the other hand, Cordemoy does not entirely accept Descartes views on rest; as will be discussed below, his physics require him to reject Descartes’ force of rest (i.e., the fourth collision rule).


on this point is that Descartes spoke of a body in the active voice, as passing from one place to another, whereas here Cordemoy talks of the body in the passive voice, as being transported (“est transporté”). In doing so, he foreshadows the occasionalism to come in the Fourth Discourse. Cordemoy acknowledges that many people would agree that some change is due to local motion, but they would be hesitant to say that all change is so explained. With this in mind, his strategy in the Second Discourse is to examine the various types of change of which scholastic philosophers speak and show that each—quantity (increase and decrease), quality (alterations), and form (generation and corruption)—can be shown to be a result of change of motion, ‘motion’ being understood as defined by Cordemoy above, that is, as a change of place (place in turn being understood as distance from other bodies). If he is successful in demonstrating this, he says, he will have shown that local motion is the only thing to which we need appeal to account for any kind of change. He begins with changes of quantity. Given his atomism, we should not be surprised that Cordemoy explains an object increasing or decreasing in size as nothing more than the adding or losing of atoms to or from the aggregate of atoms which constitute a particular physical object. In either case, this adding or losing is a matter of local motion: atoms coming or going, to put it plainly. A log thrown on a pile, which thus increases the size of the pile, is a simple example, but Cordemoy also considers the movement of nutrients from the soil and into a plant as a case of increase of size which is explained according to local motion. By change of quality, Cordemoy is concerned with alterations, defined as “changes which can happen in a body composed of many parts without augmenting or diminishing its mass and without destroying this constitution of parts in which consists its particular nature” (CG 110). An example of this sort of change is a piece of fresh bread becoming stale—the bread does not increase or decrease in size, but rather undergoes a qualitative change. What is important is that for Cordemoy this type of change is also explained by appeal to local motion. A body has the properties it does as a result of the manner in which it is structured, that is, how the atoms are arranged in relation


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to each other. Any change in the position of the atoms will thus result in a change in the properties of the body, and as said, change with regard to which bodies (atoms) are neighboring a given body (atom) is just how Cordemoy, following Descartes, understands motion. As for changes in form, Cordemoy is specifically concerned with instances of generation and corruption. In an extended example, he discusses the digestion of a piece of bread, from its being put in the mouth to its being broken down in the stomach and the nutrients being carried throughout the body via the bloodstream. Throughout his story, Cordemoy emphasizes that the entire process can be explained by appealing to various motions—the motion of the bread itself as it proceeds through the esophagus, the motion of the blood, etc. Nowhere along the journey need we appeal to occult powers or the like to explain any part of the process. Indeed, when we look at this entire discussion of change explained in terms of local motion, we are, I think, led to concur with the observation of Clair and Girbal that here Cordemoy “only makes explicit the thought of Descartes without introducing elements either new or heterogeneous.” Cordemoy shows himself to be no less faithful to Descartes in the Third Discourse. Here Cordemoy discusses machines both artificial and natural, and in particular argues that the movements of a watch and the human body are explained in exactly the same way, viz., by motion and not by Aristotelian forms. Descartes had in many places compared the human body to a machine in general and a watch or clock in particular. For example, we find the following at the close of his early Treatise on Man: I should like you to consider, after this, all the functions I have ascribed to this machine—such as the digestion of food, the beating of the heart and arteries, the nourishment and growth of Cordemoy 1968, 314. In addition to the passages cited, see also AT XI 120; CSM I 99, AT VI 56; CSM I 139, AT XI 226; CSM 315-16, and AT IV 375; CSMK III 304. The Treatise on Man was originally planned to be, along with Le Monde, part of a larger work which was, as mentioned previously, abandoned by Descartes after he learned of the treatment Galileo had received at the hands of the Inquisition. Like Le Monde, the Treatise on Man was first published by Clerselier in 1664.

92 Fred Ablondi~Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian the limbs, respiration, waking and sleeping, the reception by the external sense organs of light, sounds, smells, tastes, heat and other such qualities, the imprinting of the ideas of these qualities in the organ of the ‘common’ sense and the imagination, the retention or stamping of these ideas in the memory, the internal movements of the appetites and passions, and finally the external movements of all the limbs…I should like you to consider that these functions follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels. In order to explain these functions, then, it is not necessary to conceive of this machine as having any vegetative or sensitive soul or other principle of movement and life…(AT XI 202; CSM I 108)

In the Sixth Meditation, in the context of explaining human error, Descartes writes that: A clock constructed with wheels and weights observes all the laws of its nature just as closely when it is badly made and tells the wrong time as when it completely fulfills the wishes of the clockmaker. In the same way, I might consider the body of a man as a kind of machine equipped with and made up of bones, nerves, muscles, veins, blood and skin in such a way that, even if there were no mind in it, it would still perform all the same movements as it now does…(AT VII 84; CSM II 58)

The metaphor of human and other animal (and plant) bodies as watches and God as the Divine Watchmaker would come to represent the worldview of the new science of the seventeenth century; it is a metaphor found in the works of philosophers from Leibniz to Paley, and one which has its source in the physics and metaphysics of Descartes, among others. Turning to Cordemoy, we see that his language is quite similar to Descartes’. “We are sufficiently persuaded,” he writes in the opening of the Third Discourse, “that the arrangement of the parts of a watch are the cause of all its effects.” There is no need to “search for forms, faculties, occult virtues, or qualities in it” (CG 122). It is not the case that we can prove, says Cordemoy, that there is no soul in the watch, only that positing one is not needed to explain its movements, and


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as this is the case, “we should not multiply entities beyond necessity” (CG 123), that is, we should not admit something into our theory which does no explanatory work. At this point in the Discernement, however, Cordemoy does not pursue the watch analogy (though he will return to it later), but instead launches into a discussion of how material things such as the springs in the watch or the watch’s hands are moved. It occurs, he tells us, because there are pores in them, that is, spaces between the atoms which compose them, through which subtle matter enters. In cases in which this matter cannot exit as quickly as it entered, pressure builds up causing the spring to expand, for example. For the reader skeptical of this explanation—not because it is not plausible, but because it cannot be proven (inasmuch as we cannot see the subtle matter)—Cordemoy first reminds us that before the invention of the microscope, people were unwilling to conclude there was matter present when it could not be seen with the naked eye. In a like way, we should not deny there is matter present merely because the microscopes of the 1660’s are unable to allow us to see it. He also offers the example a glove, at first lying crumpled: when we put a hand in it so as to fill up the space we do not doubt that it is matter which expands the glove because we can see the hand doing this. But it is also true that when we blow into a glove we can inflate it, expanding it just as in the case of the hand. Here too we believe the expansion to be the result of matter (air particles) filling up the space inside the glove, even though we cannot see the matter. There are several things worth noting about Cordemoy’s remarks. First, though he doesn’t state it explicitly, his theory is in opposition to Descartes fourth collision rule. In Principles II, 49 Descartes had claimed that “if body C were a little bit larger than [body] B, and if C were entirely at rest…then no matter what the speed B could go toward C, it would never have the force to move it” (AT VIIIA 68). Cordemoy’s account of motion, on the other hand, requires that smaller particles, subtle matter, can move larger bodies. In fact, in a slightly different context, Cordemoy remarks that “it is extraordinary that many bodies, or many small portions, which are in motion around a large mass, striking it along different lines, can often times loosen it For more on what led Descartes to adopt this view, see Des Chene 1996, Chapter Eight, especially pages 308-09.


to its foundations and divide all the parts” (128). By way of example, Cordemoy notes how a large piece of bread can, when placed in water, be easily disintegrated by the smaller water particles. The second point to note is that regardless of the (erroneous) specifics of his theory, he makes no appeal to anything save bodies (atoms) in motion to explain the operations of larger bodies such as watches. And he explains the motions of the heart and the blood mechanistically as well; he concludes the Third Discourse remarking that “I am content to have shown by the examples of the Watch and the body of man that artificial Machines and natural ones have the same cause of their movement, and in considering them only as bodies, this cause is the most subtle matter” (CG 134). This appeal to subtle matter is not a return to the atomism of the First Discourse, but is taken rather from Descartes himself;10 it is this subtle matter which, in our blood, makes up the animals spirits, “the extremely small bodies which move very quickly, like the jets of flame that come from a torch” (AT XI 335; CSM I 332). Further, Cordemoy will follow Descartes’ account of circulation and the role of the heat in the heart in it, against the theories of circulation of Harvey and Bartholin.11 Finally, Cordemoy does recognize his theory would appear to lead to a regress: the motion of larger bodies is explained by the actions of smaller bodies, but how is their motion to be explained except by the motion of even smaller bodies affecting them, and so on ad infinitum? (Cordemoy explicitly states that the laws governing the material world apply equally to the very large and the very small.) Yet such a regress would clearly threaten Cordemoy’s atomism and the idea that at some point we arrive at the smallest body physically possible, that is, bodies which themselves do not have parts. What saves Cordemoy here is his occasionalism, and he refers the reader worried about such a regress to the following (Fourth) Discourse. The motions of the atoms is not (and cannot) be explained by the motion of their parts, inasmuch as they possess none. Their motion, rather, has as its source God, the cause of their initial and, by the argument of the Fourth

10 For the most detailed discussion of Descartes’ theory of circulation, see The Passions of the Soul §§ 8-11 (AT XI 333-35; CSM I 331-32). 11 For more on Descartes’ mechanistic biology, see Ablondi 1998.


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Discourse, all subsequent motions. The regress thus ends at the level of the atoms.12 Before moving from Cordemoy’s physics to his discussions of the mind-body union and the mind-body distinction, I would like to make one further comparison with Descartes.13 Like Descartes’ Meditations, Cordemoy’s Discernement is divided into six parts, and, again like the Meditations, it concludes with remarks and arguments regarding the distinction between and union of the human soul and the human body. A look at the structure of the Discernement, however, shows, as we have seen, Cordemoy beginning his account of the relation between minds and bodies by examining bodies. This is in marked contrast to Descartes, who in the first two meditations focuses on the mind as the proper methodological starting point for understanding the true nature of reality. For Descartes, we must start with the mind insofar as it is the mind which reveals the nature of body, and it is the mind whose nature is better known than is the nature of body. For Cordemoy’s project, however, it seems we need to begin with an examination of the nature of body in order to arrive at the distinction. To put it another way, whereas Descartes concentrates in the Second Meditation on what he knows he is, Cordemoy lays the stress on what he knows he is not.14 Ultimately, the goal of both thinkers is to explain 12 I think, then, that Battail is mistaken when he claims that “L’atomisme, enfin, évite les paradoxes de la regression à l’infini” (1973; 99). It is true, of course, that the motion of atoms cannot be explained by reference to their parts if they have no such parts, but we are then left with the question of from where do they receive their motion. As we saw, Cordemoy will claim in the Fourth Discourse that they cannot have motion of themselves; the motion they possess can only have its source in God. Thus it is his occasionalism, not his atomism, which allows him to escape the regress. 13 I would be remiss if I did not at least note that one finds in the Third Discourse such ‘modern’ ideas as the principle of inertia, a particle theory of light, the conservation of motion, and something resembling a kinetic theory of heat. 14 Though for Cordemoy, it goes further than this: the full title of the Discernement is “Le Discrenement du Corps et de l’Ame en six discourse pour server à l’éclaircissement de la physique.” So not only does examination of body tell me what I am not, but study of the distinction between the body and soul makes clearer the domain of physics. For more on this aspect of the Discernement, see Balz 1951, 3-7.


the relation—the union and distinction—of the mind and body, and it is to that topic which we now turn.

II. The Mind-Body Union

In the final two Discourses, Cordemoy again reverses the order of investigation as it is found in Descartes’ Meditations. Whereas in the Sixth Meditation Descartes first argues that the mind and body are really distinct (AT VII 78), and then later turns to the nature of the mind-body union (AT VII 81 ff.), Cordemoy first addresses the question of the union and only later, in the Sixth Discourse, does he discuss the distinction between the mind and body. The Fifth Discourse, on the union of the mind and body, opens with two definitions in which Cordemoy tells us just what it is to say that two bodies are united and just what it is to say that two minds are united: Definitions

1. Two bodies are united, as much as they are able to be, when their extensions are mutually touching, and with such a relation that one necessarily follows the determinations of the other. 2. Likewise, one would say that two Minds are united when their thoughts are mutually manifested, and with such a relation that one necessarily follows the determinations of the other. (CG 145-6)

Following these definitions, Cordemoy claims that however the mind and body are united, it cannot be in either of these two ways, given the essential difference between minds and bodies. We then get the following passage: But if this mind, whose nature is to think, has several thoughts with which the body is able to have some relation in terms of its extension, its movement, or some other part of its nature—for example, if from this mind willing that this body be moved in a certain way this body is indeed in this manner disposed to be so moved, or if from there being certain movements in this body there occurred certain perceptions in this mind—one can say…that they are united. And in so far as they have this relation between them, one can say that their union continues. (CG 146)


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There are (at least) three things to note about this passage: first, that the nature of the mind is to think is not something for which Cordemoy provides an argument—it is simply stated at the outset. We can contrast this with Descartes, who goes to some length in the Meditations to try to prove that thought and thought alone is the essence, or “principal attribute,” of the mind. Nor, secondly, are we given an argument for the body and mind being united, but instead are given an example which shows that they are united—the body moving in a certain way when the mind wills it to do so. Further, Cordemoy nowhere refers to the union as substantial, though he does say later that it is plus grand que the union of two bodies, which he calls “superficial” (CG 146). The third noteworthy point is that Cordemoy defines the mind-body union in terms of interaction: what it is to say that a mind and body are united just is to say that they interact with each other.15 As alluded to in the previous chapter, there is controversy in the secondary literature on Descartes as to whether the “problem of the interaction between thinking things and extended things [is distinct] from the problem concerning the union of mind and body,”16 or whether “to conceive mind and body as united is just to conceive of mind as subject, at a given time, to experiencing certain sorts of sensations in response to certain movements in the brain; and the brain as subject to certain movements as a result of certain thoughts or volitions in the mind.”17 What is important to realize is that no such question arises for Cordemoy, for whom the union of the mind and body is understood—by definition—as the interaction of two distinct substances. There is another difference between Descartes and Cordemoy on the mind-body union which is worth mentioning. Despite stating in the Meditations that the soul is intermingled with the body, and not present to it merely as a pilot in a ship (AT VII 81), Descartes 15 Of course, given Cordemoy’s occasionalism, mind and body only have the appearance of interacting—in reality it is God who in the instance that certain criteria obtain wills that there is a change in the modes of a body following the volitions of a mind or a change in the mind following something done by a body. 16 Hoffman 1986, 339. 17 Wilson 1978, 219. Note how closely her view of Descartes’ position comes to the passage cited here from Cordemoy.


famously held that “the mind is not affected by all parts of the body, but only by the brain, or perhaps just one small part of the brain, namely the part which is said to contain the ‘common’ sense,” viz., the pineal gland (AT VII 86; CSM II 59).18 This is shown, he argues, by the fact that amputees often feel pain in a limb which is no longer there—the pain obviously cannot be in an arm which is not there, and so it must be, he reasons, that “the soul has sensory awareness only in so far as it is in the brain” (AT VIIIA 319; CSM I 283). Cordemoy, on the other hand, claims that “we have reason to say that the mind is wholly in all of the body which it animates, and wholly in each part” (CG 147). This is because, he holds, the different limbs of our body can obey our will (if we are healthy), and we can feel pain in all parts of our body. Cordemoy closes the Fifth Discourse by taking the opportunity to use what he has said about the mind-body union to further support the occasionalism for which he argued in the preceding Discourse. In the first place, he claims as an axiom that substances with different natures cannot cause changes in each other (CG 149). As the mindbody union is defined in terms of the interaction of different substances, there is need to appeal to a being outside the union to effect the ability of one substance to act on the occasion of something which occurs in the other substance. An omnipotent being, of course, solves this problem nicely (though as we saw, Cordemoy explicitly remarks that this problem of mind-body interaction is just as in need of God as is body-body interaction).19 Secondly, as we also saw earlier, Descartes and Cordemoy both hold that one substance cannot transfer its modes to another, even if they are of the same nature. Consider bodies B and C: 18 See also the Optics: “[W]e know that it is not, properly speaking, because of its presence in the parts of the body which function as organs of the external senses that the soul has sensory perceptions, but because of its presence in the brain” (AT VI 109; CSM I 164); and the Principles of Philosophy Part Four: “It must be realized that the human soul, while informing the entire body, nevertheless has its principal seat in the brain; it is here alone that the soul not only understands and imagines but also has sensory awareness” (AT VIIIA 315; CSM I 279-80). 19 “Sans doute il n’est pas plus mal-aisé de concevoir l’action des esprits sur les corps, ou celle des corps sur les esprits, que de concevoir l’action des corps sur les corps” (CG 149).


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We cannot say that the movement of one may pass into the other because it is evident that the movement of each in its own respect is only a way of being (une façon d’être), from which they are not separable, [and which] cannot in some way pass into the other. (150)

For Cordemoy’s Cartesian physics, motion is a mode, and as such it only separable from the substance in motion by a distinction of reason; motion is the body being in a certain way, not a ‘thing’ to be given to another body. And just as we are obliged to say that God as the First Cause is the cause of the motion of the second object on the occasion of it being struck by the first, so too are we obliged to say that it is God who causes body to move on the occasion of our willing that it does, and that it is God who causes certain thoughts in our souls on the occasion of our body being affected in certain ways.

III. The Distinction of the Body and the Mind

The final and by far longest Discourse20 is devoted, according to its title and subtitle, to the distinction of the body and the soul, a demonstration that the existence of the soul is better known than that of the body, the particular operations of the body and soul, and the effects of this union. In fact, however, much of the Discourse is a glossary of various affects, cataloguing in particular which acts and affects are explained by motions in the body, which by the soul, and which are due to the soul-body union.21 The Sixth Discourse, like so much of the Discernement, reveals both Cordemoy’s reliance on the thought of Descartes as well as his departures from it. To begin with, we should consider the subtitle of the final Discourse itself. Clair and Girbal write that “Cordemoy here follows the plan of Descartes in the Second Meditation”.22 But we must be careful: Cordemoy writes “that the existence of the soul is better known than that of the body” (CG 152, my emphasis), not its nature; the title of 20 In the 1968 edition of Cordemoy’s collected works it runs 37 pages, compared to 56 pages for the first five Discourses combined. 21 Such glossaries can be commonly found in works on the affects during this time period. See, for example, Parts Two and Three of Descartes’ Passions of the Soul, or the definitions of the emotions at the end of Part III of Spinoza’s Ethics. 22 Cordemoy 1968, 326.


the Second Meditation is “The nature of the human mind, and how it is better known than the body” (AT VII 23; CSM II 16, my emphasis). Likewise, Chapter Two of La Forge’s Traité de l’esprit de l’homme (with which Clair and Girbal also compare the Sixth Discourse) is entitled “On the nature of the mind of man and that it is more easy to know than the body”. Malebranche, for one, would later disagree with both Descartes and La Forge on this point. While Malebranche admits that “of all our knowledge, the first is the existence of our soul; all our thoughts are incontestible demonstrations of this, since there is nothing more obvious than what actually thinks, is actually something”, he adds that “if it is easy to know the existence of our soul, it is not so easy to know its essence and nature” (OC II, 369; LO, 480).23 Gassendi had voiced a similar objection when he wrote to Descartes that “your aim was not to prove that the human mind exists, or that its existence is better known than the existence of the body…[but] your intention was surely to establish that its nature is better known than the nature of the body, and this you have not managed to do” (AT VII 275; CSM II 192).24 For his part, Cordemoy, as was discussed earlier in this chapter, claims in the Fifth Discourse (without any accompanying argument) that the nature of the mind is to think. But it is the certainty which we have of our mind’s very existence to which he calls attention in the Sixth Discourse: “nothing is more certain to the mind than the mind itself ” (CG 152). While it is true (and good) that the Church itself declares the existence of immaterial souls, our knowledge of our mind’s existence is not merely a matter of faith, but evident from the very fact that in doubting its existence, we prove it. Though he does not invoke an evil demon as Descartes does, Cordemoy is very much in line with Descartes’ line of reasoning in the Second Meditation: “it is possible,” he writes, “that I think that I have a body without there being anything extended, but it cannot be that I think that I exist without having a thought”, and thus exist (CG 154).25 23 For an excellent treatment of Malebranche’s philosophy of mind in general, and his thoughts on self-knowledge in particular, see Schmaltz 1996. 24 Régis also questioned Descartes’ view on the mind’s knowledge of its own nature; see Schmaltz 2002, 17. 25 Cf. Arnauld and Nicole in The Art of Thinking: “[W]e note that thinking is the essential characterization of the soul and that, since doubting itself


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It is not the same for the existence of bodies: on this matter we must rely on faith to know that a material world exists independently of us. But here too we see a departure from Descartes’ position, for while Cordemoy is in agreement with Descartes’ claim that the existence of the soul is better known than that of the body, he disagrees that if there is no external world, then God would be a deceiver (and ergo the proposition that there is no external world must be false, as Descartes had argued).26 And so Cordemoy concludes: I have a soul, because it is evident to me from natural light (la lumiere naturelle) and because faith assures me. As for the body, I will say that I have one because although it is not evident by natural light, it suffices me that according to faith I sin in doubting it. (155)27

Malebranche will later agree with Cordemoy on this point. He writes in the Elucidations that “we can say that the existence of matter is not yet perfectly demonstrated, i.e., with geometrical rigor” (OC III 60;

is a thought, the soul can doubt everything else without being able to doubt whether it thinks” (Arnauld and Nicole 1964 [1662], 306). 26 Compare this with Descartes in the Sixth Meditation: “So I do not see how God could be understood to be anything but a deceiver if the ideas [of external bodies] were transmitted from a source other than corporeal things” (AT VII 80; CSM II 55). In contrast, both Desgabets and Régis held that the intentionality of our ideas is sufficient to tell us that there is an extra-mental extended world. For their position, See Schmaltz 2002, 130-66. For Descartes’ proof for the existence of bodies, as well as seventeenth-century reactions to it, see McCracken 1998. 27 In a broadsheet published in 1647 anonymously (but known to be by Henricus Regius and which would lead to the break between Descartes and Regius), the author sounds close to Cordemoy’s view: “if we are seeking the merely probable, but precise and exact knowledge of reality, it is by nature doubtful whether any bodies are really perceived by us. Nevertheless, the divine revelation of Scripture removes even this doubt, and shows it to be indubitable that God created heaven and earth and everything in them, and keeps them in existence even now” (AT VIIIB 344; CSM I 295). In his response (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet), Descartes explicitly rejects this line of thinking (AT VIIIA 356-7; CSM I 302-3).


LO 572). The reason, according to Malebranche, that it has not yet been demonstrated is that it cannot be demonstrated.28 As for the argument for the distinction between the mind and the body, Cordemoy, while taking the same general approach as Descartes, offers a much less rigorous proof than that which is found in the Meditations. Descartes’ argument for the real distinction requires some of the conclusions from the Second Meditation, viz., the inability to doubt his own existence, that thought pertains to his essence, that he has a clear and distinct conception of himself as a thinking thing, and that he has a distinct conception of bodies as extended things. From the Third Meditation he also needs the proof which concludes with God’s existence and God’s benevolence (i.e., that deceit is incompatible with God’s nature). The argument for the real distinction in the Sixth Meditation is based on conceivability: Descartes says that if he can clearly and distinctly understand A apart from B, and B apart from A, then God can bring it about that A and B are apart (separate), and thus they are distinct (i.e., do not depend on one another).29 Just what is it to understand A apart from B? I am able to clearly and distinctly understand A apart from B and B apart from A, if there are attributes x and y, such that I clearly and distinctly understand that x belongs to the nature of A, and y belongs to the nature of B, and I have a clear and distinct conception of A which does not include y, and I have a clear and distinct conception of B which does not include x. Where A is myself and B is body, thought and extension satisfy the above conditions on x and y, respectively. Hence, I am really distinct from body, and can exist apart from it.30 Cordemoy, on the other hand, begins his argument for the distinction by listing what he knows about bodies and minds:

28 For Malebranche’s position on this question, see Ablondi 1994. For more on later reactions to Descartes’ proof for the existence of bodies, see McCraken 1986. 29 In what follows I closely follow the interpretation found in Wilson 1978. 30 It should be noted that Rozemond (1998) has recently challenged this (and other) interpretations of the argument, but the specifics of her interpretation need not concern us here.


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He who says Corps in this context understands a mass of several parts extended up to a certain limit, such that they necessarily exclude all other things like it. 1. This exclusion is what we call impenetrability. 2. This limit is what we call figure. 3. This relation which it has to other bodies by its situation is what we call place. 4. When this relation changes, we say that the body, at the occasion on which it changes, is in motion, and when it continues, we say that the body is at rest. He who says Soul or Mind understands that which thinks of something. 1. This thing is what we call object or idea. 2. We name perception the first view or acquaintance that the soul has of the object; attention when it considers it for some time; and memory when, after having ceased to see it, it begins to do so again. 3. If we affirm it, or if we deny something of the object, that is called judgment. 4. When we resolve after the judgment, that is called will.

“All this posed,” Cordemoy concludes, “I clearly see that what I understand by the word ‘Soul’ has nothing of that which I understand by that of ‘Body’. And thus I have reason to judge that they are two completely different things” (CG 153). Though, as said, this argument is decidedly more casual than Descartes’, it is in the same spirit: Cordemoy examines the basic features of bodies and minds, and, finding in his understanding of the concepts of ‘body’ and ‘mind’ that what is fundamentally essential to one is not only not required, but absent from the other (and vice versa), they are judged to be distinct things. While not careful to explicitly distinguish it, Cordemoy employs another, separate argument for the distinction of the soul from the body. He argues, as Descartes did in Part Four of the Discourse on Method, that my inability to doubt the existence of my mind while at the same time being able to doubt the existence of body suggests that there is a distinction between the two. Following the discovery of the truth of “I am thinking, therefore I exist”, Descartes concludes that:

104 Fred Ablondi~Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian while I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world and no place for me to be in, I could not for all that pretend that I did not exist. I saw on the contrary that from the mere fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things, it followed quite evidently and certainly that I existed; whereas if I had merely ceased thinking, even if everything else I had ever imagined had been true, I should have had no reason to believe that I existed. From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist. (AT VI 32-33; CSM I 127; my emphasis).

Compare this with Cordemoy: I even see that when I wish to doubt everything that I know when I think of bodies, I am not able at the same time to doubt my thought. For let it be false, if you will, that there are any bodies in the world; it cannot be that there are no thoughts, inasmuch as I would be thinking [when thinking there are no thoughts]. How could I believe that my thought might be the same thing that I call ‘body’? I can suppose that there aren’t any bodies, and I cannot suppose that I do not think, the supposition itself being a thought. Thus I know firstly that the soul, or that which thinks, is different from the body. (CG 153)

We can see that in the second passage, Cordemoy blends what Descartes had taken care in his Meditations to keep separate, viz., the role of doubt in the cogito argument, the argument that thought belongs to the nature of the mind, and the argument for the distinction of the mind and body.31 More importantly, Cordemoy’s argument, like Descartes’ in Part Four of the Discourse (but not the argument of the Meditations), is guilty of what is sometimes called the ‘masked man’

31 Balz (1951) is more generous in his assessment of the differences in Descartes’ argument on the one hand and Cordemoy’s on the other; for him, “Cordemoy removes the Cartesian argument from a logical, methodological, and epistemological context to what is essentially a psychological context” (21).


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fallacy, a fallacious application of (what we now call) Leibniz’ Law.32 Compare Cordemoy’s argument in the passage cited above: 1. I can suppose there are not any bodies. 2. I cannot suppose that I do not think (the supposition itself being a thought). 3. Therefore the soul (“or that which thinks”) ≠ my body. with 1. I do not know who the masked man is. 2. I know who my father is. 3. Therefore the masked man ≠ my father. or 1. Oedipus wants to marry Iocaste. 2. Oedipus does not want to marry his mother. 3. Therefore Iocaste ≠ Oedipus’ mother.

The problem, as is well known, is that Leibniz’ Law is not applicable in certain instances, among them when the predicates involved are certain intentional mental states (e.g., doubting, knowing, wanting). Cordemoy follows his argument for the distinction of the mind and body with further discussion of the basis for that argument, viz., the indubitability of the soul’s existence. Following Descartes in the Meditations, he also makes use of the sense perceptions present in dreams and the experiences of amputees to cast doubt on the veracity of information provided to our minds via the senses: I see that the argument for the soul is indubitable, and up to this point there is nothing that assures me concerning bodies. Because in short, why am I persuaded that I now have an extended body of five feet? I have sometimes dreamed that I have one composed of so many parts that their extension was more than 100 feet, and even that it touched the clouds. Who will assure me a little now, what seems to me to remain of this great body? It is (you tell me) because you sense it? But I sense the hundred feet just as I sense the five. And in fact, to not listen to my dreams too much, those who still sense some pain at the tips of fingers 32 While there are many ways to state Leibniz’ Law, the formulation relevant for our concern is (something like) this: If x has property F and y lacks property F, x ≠ y.

106 Fred Ablondi~Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian when they have had their hand cut off, they don’t imagine (although they’re completely awake) that they have some extended parts where they do not have them. (154)33

From this he concludes that “it may be now that I think I have a body without having effectively any extension; but it cannot be that I think without having effectively a thought” (CG 154).34 Given the Cartesian substance-mode ontology which Cordemoy accepts, modes such as thoughts cannot exist independently of the substance of which they are modifications. Thus, we are from the existence of a thought assured of the existence of the mind having that thought. And again, while it’s also the case that the mind’s existence is an article of faith, the lumiere naturelle is sufficient to guarantee us of this fact.35

IV. A Cartesian Account of Speech

Mouy has described Cordemoy’s 1668 Discours Physique de la parole as “like a 7th Discourse.”36 The account of speech production and language use which we find there is Cartesian in two distinct ways.37 In the first place, Cordemoy gives, as we shall see, a purely mechanical explanation of how animals produce sounds, and thus is in keeping with Descartes’ understanding of living creatures as nothing more than (natural) automata.38 In the second place, Descartes had written in 33 For the “argument du manchot” as utilized in the Cartesian tradition, see Geuroult 1959 vol. I, 88-90. 34 Cf. Descartes in the Second Meditation: “I am now seeing light, hearing a noise, feeling heat. But I am asleep, so all this is false. Yet I certainly seem to see, to hear, to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘having a sensory perception’ is strictly speaking just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking” (AT VII, 29; CSM II, 19). 35 At this point in the Sixth Discourse, Cordemoy begins his glossary of which modes of human beings are to be explained by reference to the soul, which by reference to the body, and which by reference to the mind-body union; the reader is directed to the Appendix for how Cordemoy thus classifies the various modifications. 36 Mouy 1934, 106. 37 In fact, the 1668 English translation of the Discourse bears the title A Philosophical Discourse Concerning Speech, Conformable to the Cartesian Principles. 38 Of course, humans, and humans alone, are more than automata, as their bodies are united to an immaterial, reasoning mind. Yet Descartes explicitly


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Part Five of The Discourse on Method that humans’ ability to process language—to communicate their thoughts to one another through the employment of words—is a distinguishing mark which differentiates us from all other animals, inasmuch as a soul is required for speech.39 Animals’ inability to speak as we do is not a result of their lacking the necessary organs (since on the one hand some animals can utter words, and on the other deaf and dumb humans can process language); rather, according to Descartes—and Cordemoy agrees—it is a sign “not merely that the beasts have less reason than men, but they have no reason at all” (AT VI 58; CSM I 140). Descartes did not, however, construct a developed theory of speech, though had he, it very well might have looked much like Cordemoy’s.40 As mentioned previously, Cordemoy’s stated aim in the opening pages of the DPP is whether we can be assured that there are other souls besides our own. Cordemoy takes it as a rule that if the functioning of some creature can be fully explained by appeal to a mechanical explanation involving the arrangement and operation of the physical parts of that thing, then there is no reason not to accept that explanation as sufficient. The point is that if we need not to attribute the possession of a soul (or occult qualities, for that matter) to a creature to explain its action, then we should not. When it comes to humans other than myself, though, Cordemoy confesses that: states that the human body is itself an organic machine, no different in kind than the bodies of other animals. 39 He also tells More that “speech is the only certain sign of thought hidden in a body” (AT V 278; CSMK III 366). 40 Noam Chomsky, in his pioneering work Cartesian Linguistics, devotes several pages to Cordemoy’s thought and concludes that “Cordemoy consistently maintains that the ‘experiments’ that reveal the limitations of mechanical explanation are those which involve the use of language, in particular, what we have called its creative aspects. In this, as in his discussion of the acoustic and articulatory basis for language use and the methods of conditioning, association, and reinforcement that may facilitate acquisition of true language by humans and nonlinguistic functional communication systems by animals, Cordemoy is working completely within the framework of Cartesian assumptions” (1966, 9). And Rosenfield (1968) observes that Cordemoy “picked up one of Descartes’ arguments—based on the lack of true speech among animals—and developed it fully; so fully, in fact, that after Cordemoy the point was given very little attention, as if subsequent authors considered this the last word on the subject” (40).

108 Fred Ablondi~Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian the more I take notice of the effect that my words produce before these bodies [of other humans], the more it seems to me that they are understood; and those which they proffer, responding so perfectly to the sense of mine, that it no longer seems to me the subject of doubt that a soul produces them in them as mine produces in me. (CG 203)

Specifically, then, it is the creativity required for, the novelty apparent in, and the coherence of human communication via language which requires as a necessary condition the presence of a thinking soul. As for the question of just what it is to engage in ‘true’ language use, it is according to Cordemoy (as it would be for Locke) a matter of “giving signs to one’s thoughts” (CG 196). Language is thus conceived of as an artificial system of signs, the purpose of which is to communicate our thoughts, for which the words stand as their representatives, to one another.41 In fact, despite the artificiality of language,42 Cordemoy claims that it is the gravest of sins to lie, for to do so is to misrepresent our thoughts to another, leading others into error and away from what is true and just. Though there is a need for a soul in order to engage in what would rightly be called genuine language use, the ability to make sounds can be explained on entirely mechanistic grounds (the explication being for Cordemoy very similar to how musical instruments produce sound). In this way sound production is like nutrition, circulation,

41 Cordemoy claims (at CG 199) that had we not bodies, and were we able to communicate directly one soul to another, such communication would be much more clear than it is when mediated by language. 42 While the ability to use language is the natural means God has given us to communicate our thoughts to others, what is conventional, or artificial, is that a particular people use this or that sound to represent this or that thought; in particular, the sign and the thought are not related by any sort of resemblance to one another (e.g., ‘long’ is a short word, while ‘infinitesimal’ is a long word). Indeed, Cordemoy holds that we learn language simply as a matter of repetition: having noted a constant conjunction between this sound and this object or action, we connect the sign (the sound) with the thought (the idea of the object or action). An interesting similarity with this behaviorist account of language acquisition can be found in Spinoza’s Ethics, Part II, the scholium to proposition 18.


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and respiration, none of which, as Descartes had likewise claimed,43 require a soul, but which result instead from a proper disposition of one’s organs. It is only for speech proper (in contrast to ‘causing noise’) that one requires not only a body whose organs are correctly disposed, but also a will, by which we attach words, as signs, to our thoughts. Indeed, it is, as said above, just this creative aspect of true language which requires the presence of a rational soul. As for animals such as parrots which not only make sounds, but utter words, Cordemoy claims, just as Descartes had, that ‘returning words’ is not a sign of a soul in such creatures, any more that a canyon’s echo requires rocks to have souls.44 True speech requires two things, says Cordemoy: “the formation of the voice, which can only come from the body, and the signification or idea that is joined with it, which can only come from the soul”(CG 198).45 In addition to the general account of language production and the distinction between causing sounds, a purely mechanical event, and speech proper, which is a creative activity requiring a will, there are three other points on which comparisons of Cordemoy and Descartes are interesting. The first concerns the two thinkers’ characterization of the will. Descartes’ voluntarism cannot be understated: for him, there are no limits to our will.46 He writes in the Fourth Meditation that: It is only the will, or freedom of choice, which I experience within me to be so great that the idea of any greater faculty is above my grasp; so much so that it is above all in virtue of the will that I understand to bear in some way the image and likeness of God. 43 See The Sixth Meditation (AT VII 84; CSM II 58), and also The Passions of the Soul, Part I §4 (AT XI 329; CSM I 329). 44 For Cordemoy’s remarks to this effect, see his 1968, 205-6; for Descartes, see AT VI 57; CSM I 140. 45 As for the first of these, the “formation of the voice”, Cordemoy spends part of the DPP going through each of the letters of the alphabet and describes how their sound is produced. To take just a couple of examples, he tells us that “the letter S is pronounced by approaching the lower teeth near enough to the upper ones and the tongue near enough the palate, in order not to let the air pass which is getting out of the mouth except by a whistling of sorts” while “G is pronounced by gently drawing the middle of the tongue near to the interior extremity of the palate” (CG 221-2). 46 As he explicitly says in his 25 December 1639 letter to Mersenne (AT II 628; CSMK III 141).

110 Fred Ablondi~Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian For although 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, nevertheless it does not seem any greater than mine when considered as will in the essential and strict sense. (AT VII 57; CSM II 40)

More specifically, it is that when considering whether to affirm or deny a particular judgment which is before our mind, we do not experience any external force determining us in one direction. If I find myself pushed in one direction, it can only be because of an interior inclination, such as the clarity of the understanding’s grasp of the matter. Now despite his occasionalism, Cordemoy is no less insistent on the freedom of the will, claiming that “the mind is a substance to which the power to determine itself appears so naturally” (CG 255). But interestingly he goes on to claim that it is the will in particular, as a species of thought, which is the essential property of the mind: “it would cease to be a soul if it ceased to will” (ibid.) Would Descartes have agreed with this claim? For him, thought, and thought alone, is the essence of the mind, and there are thoughts in addition to those classified under the heading of ‘operations of the will,’ namely perceptions, or ‘operations of the intellect’; these include as modes instances of sense perception, imagination, and the pure understanding.47 The question is then whether a mind with only perceptions and no volitions would still be a mind. It would be a mind which could perceive and understand, but which could not judge (Descartes’ paradigm case of willing), and as such would be even more limited than someone merely suffering from paralysis: such a mind would be unable to assent to true propositions clearly and distinctly perceived as such. Thus I think there would be good reason for a Cartesian to be hesitant to call such a substance a mind at all. (Such would also seem to be the case with a soul that possessed a will but no intellect.) The second point regards the source of human error. Both Descartes and Cordemoy are clear in claiming that in no way can God be considered responsible for our failings on the basis of it being God who gave me the faculties with which we err; “it must not in any way be imagined,” Descartes states, “that because God did not give us an 47 See The Principles, Part One §32 and following.


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omniscient intellect, this makes him the author of our error” (AT VIIIA 18; CSM I 205). Descartes instead locates the cause of error in the will’s scope being larger than that of the understanding: because the will is infinite while the understanding is not, we always have it within our power to affirm or deny something of which we do not have a clear and distinct understanding. If it were possible that we could refrain from making judgments until we had a clear and distinct understanding, we would never make a mistake: When we perceive something, so long as we do not make any assertion or denial about it, we clearly avoid error. And we equally avoid error when we confine our assertions or denials to what we clearly and distinctly perceive should be asserted or denied. Error arises only when, as so often happens, we make a judgment about something even though we do not have an accurate perception of it. (AT VIIIA17-8; CSM I 204)48

Cordemoy agrees that the blame for our mistakes lies entirely with us and cannot be attributed to God for giving us ‘faulty equipment’ with which to judge. He writes in the closing pages of the DPP that: God gives us all the light of which we have need (toutes les lumieres dont nous avons besoin); we have ideas very distinct in order to know about the things of nature inasmuch as it is useful to know them, since we are able, in that we use prudence, to discern in which ways each thing is useful or damaging to us. And although He does not give us the advantage of knowing [the insensible parts of things], He so well reveals to us how they can hurt or profit us, that in order to use it correctly we only have to will it. (CG 255-6)

Descartes too had held that “God has given each of us a light to distinguish truth from falsehood” (AT VI 27; CSM I 124). And like Descartes, Cordemoy says that we have all that we need to navigate the world safely and successfully, if only we use our God-given faculties correctly. 48 See also Meditation Four (AT VII 58-62; CSM II 40-43), as well as The Principles, Part I (AT VIIIA 5, 21, and 35-38; CSM I 193, 207, and 21821).


The final issue arising in Cordemoy’s account of language reveals an important difference between Cordemoy and Descartes. For Cordemoy, all souls are ‘created equal’; differences in various humans’ ability to understand are the result of varying arrangements of the matter of which our brains are composed; he writes: I find that the pains that some have in conceiving or explaining themselves is not a defect of Soul, and that this marvelous facility, which others enjoy to express themselves, proceeds only from a happy disposition of the brain and from all the parts which serve for the voice or to the movements of the body. (CG 198)

Just as the fact that, for example, some humans see better than others is explained by differences in their eyes, so too the fact that some of us think better than others is to be explained by appeal to the workings (of failure to work) of elements in the brain. In taking this position, Cordemoy is, Balz claims, following out quite literally the implications of Descartes’ claim for the universality of reason.49 Yet in contrast, when Descartes himself speaks of the difference between on the one hand minds which can resist the pull of the passions when they recognize that to follow them would to be led into error and on the other hand minds which cannot so resist, he attributes the latter to be a result of a defect of the will, that is, the immaterial mind itself.50

V. Descartes, Moses, and the Creation of the World

The last topic to be addressed in considering Cordemoy’s Cartesianism is a letter Cordemoy published in 1668. The full title, Lettre écrite au R.P. Cossart de la Compagnie de Jésus, pour montre que tout ce que Monsieur Descartes à écrit du systême du monde, & de l’ame des bêtes, semble être tire du premier chapitre de la Genese, explains his thesis clearly enough. While Cordemoy is firm enough in his Catholic faith to assert up front that “we ought to regard as false all which is said about nature when it is not able to conform with the circumstances of this history [which we find in Genesis],” there is no need for the good Cartesian to worry over this: as it so happens, Cordemoy says 49 Balz 1951, 14. 50 For Descartes’ remarks on weakness of will, see The Passions of the Soul, Part One, Section 48 (AT XI 366-7; CSM I 347).


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(in all seriousness!), “most of the sentiments [of Descartes] conform so well to those which Moses said that he only seems to have become a philosopher by reading this prophet” (CG 257).51 In fact, according to Cordemoy there is only one difference between what one finds in the Bible and what is in Descartes: [I]t is that Monsieur Descartes writes things very particular and with the intention of making known things in themselves, whereas Moses writes as a historian, in order to make us admire the power of his Author. Thus, one speaks only of the principle things, and the other goes in to greater detail. (CG 258)

On the key points, Cordemoy claims there is absolute agreement: Descartes clearly held that there is one God, that all there is comes from God, that God began the creation of the world by creating bodies, that God moved them then and that God continues to move them (ibid.). Cordemoy then proceeds to go through each of the six days of creation, demonstrating how the philosophy of Descartes is in complete conformity with the biblical text. The particulars of Cordemoy’s effort need not concern us—indeed, on some points the moves Cordemoy makes to render the two sources conformable with one another are highly questionable.52 It is not so 51 Descartes’ remarks on creation occur in Le Monde; see in particular chapters eight (“The formation of the sun and the stars in this new world”), thirteen (“Light”), and fourteen (“The properties of light”), as well as the summary of Le Monde found in the Discourse on Method (AT VI 41-5; CSM I 131-4). Remaining consistent with the literal account of creation in the Bible seems to not have been Descartes’ aim; he explicitly tells the reader in both Le Monde and in the summary of it in the Discourse that in order to avoid controversy by challenging the “accepted opinions of the learned,” he decided to “leave our world wholly for them to argue about and speak solely of what would happen in a new world,” supposing “that God now created, somewhere in imaginary spaces, enough matter to compose such a world” (AT VI 42; CSM I 132). As for Descartes’ own theological concerns, I believe Arnauld put it well when he wrote of Descartes that “outside of the points of which he was convinced by his philosophy—like the existence of God and the immortality of the soul—all that can be said of him to his greatest advantage is that he always seemed to submit to the Church” (quoted in Sleigh 1990, 32). 52 As Clair and Girbal ask (Cordemoy 1968, 350, n. 4), how could Cordemoy have thought he could get away with translating “Et spiritus Dei ferebatur


much a matter of the two authors voicing contrary opinions as it is their concerns being so different.53 Nevertheless, the very fact that Cordemoy undertook such a task reveals his fundamental commitment to the Cartesian philosophy, despite his departures, both great and small, from it.54 I hope that from what has been presented in this book it is clear that Cordemoy was an important and original thinker in several respects. He was perhaps the first of many to conclude that Descartes’ philosophy inescapably led to occasionalism, and his atomic theory of matter on a priori rationalist principles makes him unique among seventeenth-century thinkers. Yet as this chapter has endeavored to show, Cordemoy was, in a significant way, a Cartesian thinker. Not only do elements of his philosophy reveal this, but it is clear that he himself saw his philosophy as a carrying out of the work—as well as a correcting of some of the errors—of the great master upon whose shoulders he and many others stood.

super aquas” by the distinctly Cartesian “Et le Seigneur agitait une matière subtile au-dessus des eaux”? 53 For example, if one reads Descartes on light, it hardly seems that the author of Genesis was doing anything of a similar sort when he wrote of God’s saying “Let there be light” and God’s subsequent separating of the light from the darkness. Nor does one imagine (as Cordemoy does) that by not explicitly attributing a soul to plants, the author of Genesis intended to endorse a Cartesian conception of nature according to which reason is not required for nutrition. For a detailed examination of Cordemoy’s defense of Descartes on these matters, see Battail 1973, 64-85. 54 Cordemoy even suggests that such departures are warranted given that “Descartes did not pretend that his hypotheses were true in general and he even recognized that they are false in certain things” (CG 275).

Appendix Glossary in the Sixth Discourse (CG 156-189) I. That which belongs to me on account of my having a soul. Thought. Perceptions. Intelligence. Imagination. Judgments. Doubts. Errors. The Freedom of judgments. Different acts of the will. The Freedom of the will. Love. Hate. Sadness. Desires. Fear. II. That which belongs to me on account of my having a body. Figure. Movement—And the organs in general. Nourishment. The Course of the sprits to the brain. Their Passage in the nerves. Their Passage in the muscles. The Transport of the whole body. Being awake. Sleep. Relaxation. Drunkenness. Convulsions.


Death. III. That which is due to the union of my mind and body. What it is to see. What it is to hear. What it is to grasp an odor. What it is to feel—what it is to taste. What hunger is, considering only the body. What thirst is. Pain. Delight. Ticklishness The feeling of hunger and thirst. The cause of the first passions of the soul. Love. What one ought to understand by the word Passion. Hate. Joy. Sadness. Desire. Vision. Hearing. Smelling. Taste. Touch.

Here it would seem that Cordemoy has in mind the experience of being in love, or of hating, that is, what it feels like from the first-person perspective (what is called today the phenomenal character) to be in love or to hate someone or something. In this regard, he discusses, for example, what physically occurs in the stomach when one experiences love. In the first section on those emotions which depend on the having of a soul, he is considering the ability, as an act of the will, to love or to hate. Here and following Cordemoy goes into considerably more detail in his discussion of the mechanics of the five senses than he had at the beginning of the section above.

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Index Ailly, P. d’, 64 al-Ghazali, 64n amputations, implications for dualism of, 98, 105-6 Ariew, R., 33n, 43n, Aristotle on motion, 88, 91 Arnauld, A., 9, 51, 55, 58n, 60n, 77, 100n, 113n, Asharites, 64n Ayers, M., 10 Balz, A., 30n, 42, 56, 82-84, 104n, 112 Bartholin, C., 94 Battail, J.-F., 11n, 12n, 24, 66n, 68, 70, 95n Bennett, J., 21 Bennevaux, Mme. De, 11 Biel, G., 64 body, existence of, 100-102 body vs. matter, 23-26 Bouillier, F., 64 Boussuet, A., 11n, 12

Daniel, G., 12n dauphin, Cordemoy as tutor of the, 12 De la Ville, L., 27n Democritus, 43 Descartes, R.: accused of atomism, 22n; and Moses, 112-3; and the organization of the Meditations, as compared to the Discernement, 95-96; arguments against atomism, 20-21; arguments against the possibility of a void, 21-22; on affects, 99n; on error, 110-111; on extension as essence of body, 17-20; on God as deceiver, 101; on God’s simplicity, 25n; on language, 105-107, 109; on light, 114n; on living bodies as machines, 91-92, 106, 109;on matter, 15-22, 26; on motion, 36, 38-39, 87-90; on the existence of body, 101, 102n; on the existence of the mind, 100; on the indefinite divisibility of matter, 22, 30, 34-36; on the indefinite extension of matter, 30-33; on the mind-body distinction, 102-104; on the mind-body union, 97-98; on the nature of the mind, 100; on the relation between divine conservation and continuous creation, 63n, 67-68, 70-71, 73, 77; on the will, 61n, 109-112; on the withdrawal from publication of Le Monde, 11, 91n; ontology (substance-attribute-mode), 1617, 65n, 99, 106 Desgabets, R., 9, 13, 49-51, 75, 101n

Cartesianism, 9, 13, 15 change, as due to motion alone, 90-93 changes in form, 91 changes in quality, 90-91 changes in quantity, 90 Chomsky, N., 12, 107n circulation, theories of, 94 Clair, P., 55, 65n, 66, 68, 70, 99, 113n Clatterbaugh, K., 43n, 64n Clauberg, J., 55, 65 Clerselier, C., 44 continuous creation, relation of divine conservation to, 62-63, 67-75 Epicurus, 43 Cordemoy, L.-G., 12 Cossart, R., 12 Fredosso, A., 55n Cudworth, R., 22n

126 Fred Ablondi~Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian Fromentier, 43n Fromondus, L., 22n

Malebranche, N., 9, 55, 59, 60-63, 64n, 65-66, 68n, 69-75, 77-79, 86, 100, 102n masked man fallacy, 104-105 matter, divisibility of, 31, 34-35 McCracken, C., 9 metaphysical (vs. physical) atomism, 27-8 mind-body distinction, 28-29, 95n, 102-106 mind-body union, as defined in terms of interaction, 97-98 mind, existence vs. nature of, 99100 Molière, J.-B., 12 motion, as mode of body, 99 Mouy, P., 52n, 73n, 87n, 106n

G, pronunciation of, 109n Galileo, G., 11n Garber, D., 10, 16n, 18n, 20, 30n, 35, 37n, 38n, 71n, 74n, 87 Gassendi, P., 9, 13, 27, 31, 43, 44, 100 Genesis, Book of, 112-114 Geulinx, A., 55, 59, 61 Girbal, F., 55, 66, 68, 70, 99, 113n God: and mind-body interaction, 82; as cause of motion, 56-60, 72, 95, 99; as substance, 16-17; power of, 27-29, 45, 113 Gouhier, H., 15n, 55, 64-66, 68, 70, 71, 73, 82n Gousset, J., 65n Nadler, S., 9, 10, 63n, 69n, 72n, 74n, Gueroult, M., 66, 68, 70, 71n 80, 84-86 Nicolas of Autrecourt, 64 Jolley, N., 9 Nicole, P., 58n, 60n, 100n Harvey, W., 94 Hobbes, T., 9 Hoffman, P., 40n, 97

occasionalism: Malebranche’s arguments for, 60-63, 86; mind-body interaction and, 59n, 79-86; origins of in the seventeenth century, 64individuation of bodies, 36-43; 65; reconciling free will with, 7746-47 79, 110; source of Malebranche’s infinite/indefinite distinction, 30arguments for, 65-75 34 Pessin, A., 63n, 64n La Forge, L. de, 9, 55, 65, 73-75, piece of wax passage, 18-20 77, 100 Platonism, 49 laws of impact, Descartes’, 37n, 67, problem of other minds, 107-108 89n, 93 Prost, J., 11n, 43n, 44n, 47n, 49n, Leibniz, G.-W., 9, 26n, 51-53 65n, 76n Leibniz’s Law, 105 Lennon, T., 10, 27n, 71n, 85 Quinn, P., 68n, 72n Locke, J., 108 Régis, P.-S., 9, 13, 49-51, 100n, Maignan, E., 11, 43n 101n Regius, H., 101n rest, as a real quality, 89

Index Rochon, A., 75n, 76 Rohault, J., 11, 24n, 27n, 44n, 51 Rosenfield, L.C., 107n Ross, B., 43n S, pronunciation of, 109n Schmaltz, T., 9, 10, 13, 37n, 87n Spinoza, B., 9, 26n, 38n, 108n Spinozism, 35 Suarez, F., 73n, 76 substance, ontological status of, 1617, 25-26, 65n Thomas Aquinas, 76 Verbeek, T., 10 void, existence of, 29-30 Webster, J., 22n Wilson, M., 97, 102

127

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