French Cartesian Scholasticism: Remarks on Descartes and the First Cartesians

Tad M. Schmaltz University of Michigan

I address two questions prompted by the discussion in Roger Ariew’s Descartes and the First Cartesians. The first is whether the sort of scholasticization of Cartesianism to which First Cartesians draws attention is merely a matter of packaging, or whether it indicates rather a substantive connection between Cartesianism and Aristotelian scholasticism. The second question is whether the French Cartesians Ariew emphasizes played a central role in the transition from the widespread condemnation of Cartesian doctrines in France in the decades following Descartes’s death to the widespread acceptance of Cartesianism within the French universities by the beginning of the eighteenth century. In response to the first question, I focus on the deviation in later Cartesianism from Descartes’s own rejection of scholastic syllogistic logic. In response to the second, I offer some reasons to question the significance of the influence of the figures that Ariew highlights, and I argue that Cartesians such as Pourchot and Malebranche had a relatively greater impact on the teaching of Cartesianism in French universities in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries.

In a 1669 letter to his mentor Thomasius, Leibniz writes that “hardly any of the Cartesians have added anything to the discoveries of their master” insofar as they “have published only paraphrases of their leader.”1 The book that is the focus of my remarks here—Roger Ariew’s Descartes and the First Cartesians (hereafter, First Cartesians)—shows that Leibniz was most certainly incorrect. In particular, Ariew draws attention to the fact that there was a concerted effort to present a new sort of Cartesianism that conforms to the structure of the early modern French scholastic curriculum. Though

1. Leibniz to Thomasius, 10/20 Apr. 1669, in Leibniz 1960, 1:16.

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this effort was inspired by Descartes’s own attempt to present his views in this manner, the later “Cartesian scholasticism” that Ariew considers was not merely a set of paraphrases of Descartes but involved some significant modifications of his system.2 Before considering Ariew’s account of Cartesian scholasticism, it is worth pausing over his category of “first Cartesians.” The label itself may seem to be misguided insofar as some of the Cartesians that Ariew highlights published toward the end of the seventeenth century, and thus were not first in any reasonable chronological sense.3 However, we can perhaps understand this label in terms of the fact that the attempt among Descartes’ followers to present his system in proper scholastic form began soon after his death, with the publication in 1654 of Jacques Du Roure’s La philosophie divisée en toutes ses parties. Later Cartesians who joined this effort count as first Cartesians only in the sense that their project of providing a complete Cartesian alternative to scholastic philosophy is a relatively early one in post-Descartes Cartesianism. Indeed, as I have indicated, such a project has its source in Descartes’s own writings. Descartes desired that his views be taught in the universities of his native France, a desire indicated by the development of his Principia philosophiae. Descartes announces this work to Mersenne in a 1640 letter as un Cours de ma Philosophie suitable for use in the schools (Descartes 1964– 1974 7:577).4 He notes his plan to publish his work with an annotated copy of the scholastic manual of the French Cisterian Euchachius a Sancto Paulo. Descartes abandoned this plan by 1641, but also claimed in his 1642 letter to Dinet—a leading French Jesuit and Descartes’ former teacher at La Flèche—that he still intends to present his philosophy in the Principia in “a style more suited to the current practice in the Schools.” In particular, Descartes modeled this text on the relatively new French genre of the philosophy cursus, of which Eustachius’ manual provides a particularly popular example. The appearance of this sort of manual in France, not coincidentally, followed a change in the teaching of philosophy in the French universities. Whereas this teaching had been the responsibility of

2. The notion of “Cartesian scholasticism” is mine rather than Ariew’s. Nonetheless, this notion can be found in earlier Cartesian scholarship, as indicated by the title of Josef Bohatec’s Die cartesianische Scholastik in der Philosophie und reformierten Dogmatik des 17. Jahrhunderts (Bohatec 1912). Whereas Ariew’s focus is on a French Catholic context, Bohatec’s is on a Dutch and German Protestant context. 3. See, for instance, Regis 1690, [1691] 1970, and Le Grand 1694. Regis, in particular, was a prominent representative of a generation of Cartesians that followed ﬁrst generation French Cartesians such as Du Roure, Clerselier, and Rohault. 4. Descartes to Mersenne, 11 Nov. 1640, in AT 3:233. Descartes 1964–1974 hereafter AT.

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the Faculty of Arts, it was moved to newly established collèges de plein exercice.5 In fact, Descartes’ school at La Flèche was itself just such a collège. In these colleges, the cursus increasingly replaced the texts of Aristotle and commentaries thereon that had previously provided the basis for philosophical instruction. These new manuals bypassed the need for laborious investigations of Aristotle’s own writings by presenting the basic elements of a properly Christianized Aristotelian position in a readily di- gestible form.6 Descartes clearly intended that his Principia present his own philosophical system in the same way, and so promote its dissemina- tion in the French academy. As Ariew makes clear, however, Descartes was not entirely successful in his attempt to present his system in a recognizably scholastic form. Eustachius’ manual reveals that it was customary for scholastics to present philosophy in four parts: starting with the “practical” disciplines of logic and ethics and followed by the “speculative” disciplines of physics and metaphysics. Descartes said almost nothing in his Principia about the practical disciplines. In his preface to the French translation of this text, Descartes recommends that those who wish to instruct themselves should start with the study of a kind of logic “that teaches us to direct our reason with a view to discovering the truths of which we are ignorant,” and end with the study of “the highest and most perfect moral system, which presupposes a complete knowledge of the other sciences and is the ultimate level of wisdom” (AT 9-1:13–14). He also noted that he had provided “the principle rules for logic” in his earlier Discours de la méthode (1637). However, he had virtually nothing in print to offer with respect to “the highest and most perfect moral system.”7 Moreover, Descartes failed to provide anything close to a complete coverage of the topics standardly included in scholastic discussions of the speculative disciplines. Descartes himself admitted the deﬁciency with respect

5. This institution was a ﬁfteenth-century development in Paris, but it greatly expanded in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, due to its adoption as a primary means of education. These collèges typically combined secondary instruction in Latin and Greek grammar and rhetoric with at least two years of university-level work in philosophy. 6. For further discussion of this innovation in French teaching, see Brockliss 1996. On the evolution in the schools from dependence on the corpus Aristotelicum to the use of the new philosophy manual, see Schmitt 1988. 7. Descartes did offer scattered remarks on ethics in his correspondence, and in the ﬁrst volume of his edition of Descartes’ Lettres, Clerselier drew attention to these remarks by starting the volume with Descartes’ 1647 letter to Queen Christina on “the sovereign good of this life,” and by including several letters to Princess Elisabeth on moral and political topics. In his preface to the volume, Clerselier notes that Descartes shows through these letters “that morals was one of his most common meditations” (AT 5: 748).

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to his treatment of physics in the Principia. He does note in his preface that his text covers “all that is most general” in physics, such as the laws of nature and the composition of heavenly bodies, as well as the nature of terrestrial elements and sensible qualities. However, he also indicates the lack of any systematic consideration of “the nature of all the particular bodies that exist on the earth, namely, minerals, plants, animals and, most importantly, man.” Afternotingthathemostlikelywillneverprovide such a consideration, Descartes requests that future generations “forgive me if from now on I give up working on their behalf” (AT 9-2:16–17). First Cartesians serves to draw attention to the fact that some of Descartes’ French successors eagerly took up the task of providing a more complete Cartesian counterpart of the scholastic cursus. They introduced not only various scholasticized versions of Cartesian logic and ethics hardly to be found in Descartes, but also broader coverage of physics and metaphysics that sometimes deviates from what Descartes himself says. The treatment in First Cartesians of these issues is dense but illuminat- ing. The discussion there of the development of the scholastic textbook further develops and reinforces the theme—familiar from Ariew’s earlier work—that the scholasticism of the manuals cannot simply be identified with Thomism given the strong influence of Scotistic views on scholastic discussions.8 Moreover, the focus on Cartesian scholasticism in First Cartesians allows Ariew to draw attention to Cartesians hardly noted in the recent literature, such as Du Roure, Antoine Le Grand, and Pierre-Sylvain Regis.9 As in the case of Ariew’s discussion of early modern scholasticism, there is a wealth of information here concerning the scholasticization of Cartesianism in the work of these other Cartesians that will provide much material for future scholarship. Rather than diving into the details, however, I will confine myself for the most part to a couple of general questions concerning the significance of the strand of French Cartesianism that Ariew emphasizes. The first question is more philosophical in nature: Was the scholasticization of Cartesianism merely a matter of packaging, or does it indicate a substantive connection between Cartesianism and Aristotelian scholasticism? The second question is more historical: Did the French Cartesians that Ariew emphasizes play a central role in the transition from the widespread condemnation of Cartesian doctrines in France in the decades following Descartes’ death to the widespread acceptance of Cartesianism within the French universities by the beginning of the eighteenth century?

8. See, for instance, Ariew 1999, ch. 2. 9. Though cf. the discussion of Regis in Schmaltz 2002.

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First question first. There is some reason to suspect that for Descartes himself, the scholastic features of the Principia were supposed to be relatively superficial. Descartes reports that in this text, I shall use a style more suited to the current practice in the schools. That is, I shall deal with each topic in turn, in short articles, and shall present topics in such an order that the proof of what comes later depends solely on what has come earlier, so that everything is connected together in a single structure. (Letter to Dinet, AT 7:577) The suggestion here, perhaps, is that what is primarily scholastic about his Principia is its manner of presentation rather than its content. To be sure, at times Descartes claims that the connections to Aristote- lian scholasticism are more robust. Thus, in a 1644 letter to the Jesuit Charlet, Descartes writes that though people accuse him of novelty, “I do not use any principles that were not accepted by Aristotle and by all those who have ever concerned themselves with philosophy” (AT 4:141).10 There is this same bow to tradition in the Principia itself, in which Descartes notes that “I have not employed any principle that was not accepted by Aristotle and all other philosophers of every age. So this philosophy is not new, but the oldest and most common of all” (AT 8-1:323).11 Indeed, Descartes’ account of the material world in the Principia does have some significantly Aristotelian elements. For instance, the arguments in Part II of this text against atoms and the void are reminiscent of the critique of ancient atomism in the work of Aristotle and his scholastic followers.12 Nonetheless, the purportedly Aristotelian elements of Descartes’ system must be considered together with his famous remark in a letter to Mersenne that his Meditations contain “foundations for physics” that “de- stroy the principles of Aristotle” (AT 3:298).13 So much for Descartes’ claim that he has not employed any principle not accepted by Aristotle. So much also, it seems, for the view that Descartes’ system bears a substantive connection to Aristotelian scholasticism. To this point, then, it appears that the scholastic trappings of Descartes’ system serve mainly as a kind of Trojan horse for the introduction into the schools of a system that “destroys the principles of Aristotle.” ButasI understand him, Ariew is concerned in First Cartesians to show that the

10. Descartes to Charlet, Oct. 1644. 11. PP IV. 200 12. See PP II.16, 20, AT 8-1:49, 51–52; cf. the critique of Democritus’ physics in PP IV.202, AT 8-1:325. For the medieval background to disputes over atoms and the void, see Grant 2008. 13. Descartes to Mersenne, 28 Jan. 1641.

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attempts of later Cartesians to link Descartes to scholasticism were more substantive. One reason for this is that in order to succeed in the task of providing a complete Cartesian manual, these later thinkers needed to accommodate views that Descartes himself was unwilling to accommodate. We see this most clearly, I think, in the case of logic. Ariew indicates that the scholastic treatment of logic underwent considerable revision over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.14 Whereas previous scholastic works devoted to logic tended to be commentaries on selected portions of Aristotle’s Organon (different portions in different cases), the later scholastic manuals dispensed with close commentaries and were organized around the three main logical operations of mind, namely, simple apprehension, judgment, and reasoning, the last of which concerns the syllogism. Ariew also mentions that there is at least one scholastic text— Louis de Leslache’s 1648 La philosophie divisée en cinq parties—that adds a fourth part on method, that is, the resolution and composition of knowledge (Ariew 2014, pp. 164–65). This sort of development was largely lost on Descartes, who tended to identify scholastic logic with the syllogism. Moreover, his view of the syllogism is clearly and consistently negative. Thus, he notes in the Discours that syllogisms “serve rather to explain to someone else the things that one already knows, or even … to speak without judgment on matters of which one is ignorant, rather than to learn them” (DM II, AT 6:17). His later suggestion in the preface to the French translation of his Principia is that a “true logic” based on his rules for method is supposed to replace the logic of the schools. At this point, there is one quibble I have with the discussion in First Cartesians. On the basis of a passage from a later work, the so-called “Con- versation with Burman,” Ariew claims that Descartes came to adopt a more positive view of traditional logic, condemning only the “rhetorical misuse of logic” (Ariew 2014, p. 112.)15 In this passage, Descartes is reported to have qualified his earlier criticism of logic by noting that it ap- plies not to logic, which “provides a demonstrative proof of all subjects,” but rather “dialectic,” which merely “teaches us how to hold forth on all subjects” (AT 5:175). But first, as Ariew himself has taught us, we cannot simply assume that this text accurately reports Descartes’ own views.16 Here it might be significant that the Dutch-trained Cartesian Johannes Clauberg—a devotée of scholastic syllogistic logic—helped Frans Burman

14. See especially Ariew 2014, §2.1. 15. Though Ariew does say that this later view only “seems a bit different” and “is not altogether inconsistent” with Descartes’ more negative views, he nonetheless speaks of an “evolution” in Descartes’ thought away from his earlier stance on scholastic logic. 16. See the excellent defense of this point in Ariew 1987.

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edit the report of the conversation. And secondly, even if the report is ac- curate, when Descartes praised the “logic” that “provides a demonstrative proof of all subjects,” he may have had in mind his own method rather than scholastic syllogistic logic. Descartes’ rules of method were in fact repeated in the sections on logic in later Cartesian manuals. However, there was a recognition among later Cartesians that a consideration of these rules could not replace the much richer treatment in scholastic manuals, such as Eustachius’ text, of the logical operations of mind. There is, for instance, Arnauld and Nicole’s Logique, ou l‘Art de penser, a work that provided the basis for the treatment of logic in Regis’ later Cartesian manual.17 In line with the standard arrangement in the scholastic cursus, the discussion in the Logique is organized around the principal operations of mind, namely, conception, judgment, reasoning, and ordering (method).18 In some cases, Cartesian elements are imported into the discussion, as in the consideration of conception in terms of “clear and distinct” or “confused and obscure” ideas, and in the appeal in the consideration of ordering to the axiom that “everything contained in the clear and distinct idea of a thing can truthfully be affirmed of it” (Logique I.9 and IV.7, in Arnauld [1775–1783] 1964–1967, 41: pp. 156–62, 381–82.) Nonetheless, the Logique also provides an extended discussion of the syllogism as part of the treatment of the mental operation of reasoning. There is thus an acceptance here of the very “logic of the schools” that Descartes himself consistently denigrated. Here I am simply following Ariew’s own argument that “the logic produced by the Cartesians merely reinforced some developments in seventeenth-century scholastic logic” and therefore “looks very much like a Neo-Scholastic work” (Ariew 2014, p. 207). The later Cartesian treatment of logic indicates that Cartesianism needed to undergo some substantial revision—much more substantial than Descartes would have thought—in order to be fully presentable in scholastic form. But what role did this sort of modification of Cartesianism play in the even- tual acceptance of Cartesianism within the French universities? This was our second question. I find in First Cartesians theanswerthatitinfact played a significant role. When attempting to explain how Cartesians were able to replace Aristotelians in the schools, for instance, Ariew emphasizes that the former “tried to supplant the Aristotelians by producing Cartesian textbooks that would teach the whole collegiate curriculum, logic,

17. Arnauld and Nicole’s Logique was first published in 1662, with a fifth and final edition appearing in 1683. This work influenced the discussion of logic in the first part of Regis’ Système de philosophie (Regis 1690), which is found also in the re-titled second edition, Cours entier de philosophie, ou, Système générale selon les principes de Descartes (Regis [1691] 1970). 18. Recall the quadripartite organization of Leslache’s earlier treatment of logic.

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metaphysics and natural theology, physics and ethics, in a Cartesian mode” (Ariew 2014, p. 205). However, I think that the influence of the Cartesian manuals that Ariew highlights is not entirely straightforward. For one thing, scholastic manuals written for use in academic instruction—such as Eustachius’ text— were composed in Latin, the universal language of the schools. This renders intelligible the fact that Descartes’ Principia—in contrast to his Discours— was originally published in Latin. However, the French examples of the Cartesian cursus that Ariew considers in most detail—those of Du Roure and Regis—were written in French.19 Why French, when the point was to make Cartesianism presentable to the schools? To answer this question, we need to recognize the presence in early modern France of vernacular versions of the scholastic cursus. For instance, Ariew mentions as examples the manuals of Lesclache and Théophraste Bouju (Bouju 1614; Lesclache 1648). These manuals were typically dedi- cated to members of court, which suggests that there was a French market for this sort of text among members of the nobility eager for a university- level education in philosophy that does not require proficiency in Latin.20 Both Du Roure and Regis evidently were concerned to tap into this market by presenting the new Cartesian philosophy in a familiar scholastic form. However, since their Cartesian manuals were in the vernacular, they were not suitable for use in the schools, and therefore cannot explain—at least directly—the increasing success of Cartesianism in the French academy. Yet there is an example of a Latin Cartesian cursus produced from the inside that Ariew mentions at one point in First Cartesians but brackets.21 This is the Institutio philosophica of the Paris philosophy professor Edmond Pourchot, which was published in 1695 but is based on lectures presented decades earlier.22 There is in fact reason to think that the views in this work were a prime target of an official campaign against Cartesianism at the University of Paris during the 1690s and early-1700s. A Cartesian Mémoire of this campaign reports that in August 1691, “some person ill- disposed toward the University” passed along to the Archbishop of Paris, Harlay de Champvallon, a list of eleven propositions “pretended to have been abstracted from some professors of philosophy at the University.”23 The archbishop examined various theses sponsored by these professors, and finding nothing corresponding to the eleven propositions, the matter

19. Antoine Le Grand, who Ariew also emphasizes, wrote in Latin (see, for instance, Le Grand 1672), but his work was addressed to an English rather than a French audience. 20. Cf. the discussion of this point in Blair 2006, pp. 369–70. 21. See Ariew 2014, pp. xviii–xix. 22. For more on Pourchot’s life and writings, see Piaia 2011, pp. 88–91. 23. The Mémoire is reproduced in Jourdain 1862–1866, 2: pp. 127–28.

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seemed to be at an end. However, the following October the same person who offered the list to Harlay found a way to present it to the king. Always distressed by any hint of disorder in the universities, Louis XIVordered his archbishop to conduct a new examination of the philosophy professors, and Harlay subsequently took the simpler route of having the rector of the University require philosophy faculty to sign a formulary denouncing the eleven propositions. The Mémoire identifies neither the person behind the 1691 formulary nor its targets within the University. However, this report does relate an incident in 1699 involving a certain member of the Paris Faculty of Med- icine, “M. Desprez” (Jacques Desprez). Repeated complaints from this individual about deviations from the formulary were passed along to the king, apparently through Louis’ confessor. The author of the Mémoire claims that the source of Desprez’s complaints was his desire to win a certain benefice by showing his loyalty to the religion of the king, and that his plan was thwarted by a report of his conduct to the king by “wise persons … who are well disposed toward the University.” Believing that Pourchot, the then-syndic of the University, was among this group, Desprez complained in 1700 to a high government official that Pourchot was in fact the principal proponent in the University of doctrines condemned in the 1691 formulary (Jourdain 1862–1866, 2:128). One cannot accept at face value the report here of Desprez’smotiva- tions. The Mémoire has a decidedly Cartesian bias, after all. However, there can be little doubt that by 1700 Pourchot had become the main target of the campaign against Cartesianism in the University of Paris. This fact is confirmed in the famous Arrêt burlesque. This work had originally been written in defense of “Cartistes et Gassendistes” in response to the official condemnation of new philosophies by the Paris Parlement in 1671, but which a 1700 edition added to its list of heroes “Pourchotistes et Malebranchistes.”24 It would be reasonable to take Pourchot to be a main target even in 1691, since he and his colleague Guillaume Dagoumer were on the vanguard of the effort to smuggle the Cartesian philosophy into the curriculum at the University of Paris in a way that downplayed any fundamental opposition to Aristotelianism. In any event, due to the actions of some unknown person (could it be our friend Desprez?), members of the Paris Faculty of Arts were forced to sign a formulary condemning the following specific propositions: 1. One must rid oneself of all kinds of prejudices and doubt everything before being certain of any knowledge;

24. For the relevant passage from the Arrêt, see Boileau-Despréaux 1810, 2:219.

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2. One must doubt whether there is a God until one has a clear and distinct knowledge of it; 3. We do not know whether God did not create us such that we are always deceived in the very things that appear the clearest; 4. As a philosopher, one must not develop fully the unfortunate con- sequences that an opinion might have for faith, even when the opinion appears incompatible with faith; notwithstanding this, one must stop at that opinion, if it is evident; 5. The matter of bodies is nothing other than their extension and one cannot exist without the other; 6. One must reject all the reasons the theologians and the philosophers have used until now (with Saint Thomas) to demonstrate the existence of God; 7. Faith, hope, and charity, and generally all the supernatural habits are nothing spiritual distinct from the soul, as the natural habits are nothing spiritual distinct from mind and will; 8. All the actions of the infidels are sins; 9. The state of pure nature is impossible; 10. The invincible ignorance of natural right does not excuse sin; 11. One is free, providing that one acts with judgment and with full knowledge, even when one acts necessarily. (Quoted in Argentré [1736] 1963, 3-1:149–50) After 1691, the formulary subsequently became the primary vehicle for addressing academic controversies over Cartesianism in Paris, with further signings of it being required in 1693, 1704, 1705, and 1707. Whereas the first five propositions are most clearly Cartesian, I have argued elsewhere that the last four propositions are linked rather to the controversial account of human freedom in the Augustinus of the Louvain theologian Cornelius Jansen. Propositions purportedly drawn from this text were officially condemned in papal bulls from the 1650s, including the claim that moral responsibility for sin does not require that the sinner be free from “the necessity of willing and acting” (Denzinger 1963, pp. 445–46). In the 1691 formulary we have an attempt to link Jansenism to Cartesianism. The attempt was required since the Church had not condemned Descartes’ philosophical views in the way in which it had condemned the theological views of Jansenius. There was thus a clear motive for critics of Cartesianism to cast aspersions on it by insinuating that it is of a piece with a heretical Jansenism.25

25. On the complex relation between Jansenism and Cartesianism, see Schmaltz 1999.

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In order to illustrate the connection of the 1691 formulary to Pourchot’s Institutio, let us focus on the seventh proposition, on natural and supernatural habits.26 Though this proposition may not seem to be particularly Cartesian, its connection to controversies over Cartesianism is indicated by the discussion in the 1682 Principes de la philosophie contre les nouveaux philosophes of the Oratorian Jean-Baptiste de la Grange. In his text, La Grange considers the Cartesian axiom that anything other than substance is a mode that is inseparable from the substance it modifies. He concludes that this axiom conflicts with the teaching of the Council of Trent that su- pernaturally induced states such as justifying grace are causes that inhere in the soul but nonetheless are distinct from it (La Grange 1682, pp. 90–9).27 In the section on “pneumatologia” in his Institutio, Pourchot insists that supernatural habits are distinct from our natural habits simply in virtue of the fact that the former are infused by God (Pourchot [1695] 1733, p. 186).28 To be sure, he also was defiant in denying that any of these habits are—or that Church doctrine requires that they be—entities that are distinct from the soul. However, Pourchot was careful to allow for the position that spiritual habits differ in some sense from natural habits, and thus that they can be distinguished from natural features of the soul. Here he was helped somewhat by ambiguities in the requirement to deny the seventh proposition. It is unclear whether one was required to deny simply that spiritual habits are nothing distinct from the soul, or rather that spiritual habits are nothing distinct in the same way that natural habits are nothing distinct. It therefore was open to Pourchot to understand the requirement in this second, more restricted manner. Even though La Grange had argued at length against the claim that natural habits are nothing distinct from the soul,29 moreover, Pourchot could read the formulary as prohibiting only a (restricted) claim about spiritual habits (La Grange 1682, pp. 65–98). Whereas the seventh proposition of the formulary has some connection to Pourchot’s writings, the same cannot be said of the first four, more explicitly Cartesian, propositions. The section on logic in the Institutio

26. Here I am drawing on the more detailed discussion in Schmaltz 2004 of the relation of the 1691 formulary to Pourchot’s Institutio. There I argue that the the sixth proposition also can be linked to the fact that Pourchot’s Institutio tends to favor Descartes’“metaphysical” arguments for the existence of God over the more “physical” arguments of Thomas Aquinas. 27. In particular, La Grange claims that the doctrine of the Council of Trent, that grace is an infused cause of meritorious action, requires that such grace cannot simply be a mode of the soul. 28. Cf. the discussion of the operations of grace in Pourchot [1695] 1733, pp. 143–44. 29. La Grange insisted in particular that the moral virtues and science or knowledge are “Etres [qui] different de notre Ame.”

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follows the model of the new scholastic cursus in being organized around the mental operations of simple perception, judgment, and syllogistic reasoning (Pourchot [1695] 1733, pp. 12–74). Pourchot did introduce the Cartesian terminology of clear and distinct ideas, and he stressed with Descartes the need to rid oneself of unfounded prejudices.30 Yet he did not require that one “doubt everything” even to the extent of allowing that God could deceive, and he certainly never conceded that there could be evident propositions that are contrary to faith. Admittedly, one can find a version of the fifth proposition of the 1691 formulary in Pourchot’s Institutio since the section on physics in that text presupposes the identification of matter with extension. It was a common complaint among early modern Catholic critics of Cartesianism that such an identification is incompatible with the doctrine of the Eucharist. In particular, the Cartesian view of body is said to conflict with the requirement of this doctrine that the “species” of the eucharistic bread and wine— including their extension—can miraculously subsist apart from the substance of these elements. However, Pourchot is careful to say in the Institutio that he is considering body only insofar as it “is natural, or insofar as it is really and actually extended in length, width and breadth,” and not insofar as it is considered, for instance, with respect to the miracle of the Eucharist (Pourchot [1695] 1733, pp. 216–17).31 He was therefore in a position to sincerely assert that he complied with the letter of the 1691 formulary. This is not to say that Pourchot was able to escape controversy; after all, there is the formulary itself. Nonetheless, by the time of the publication of the Institutio, the damage had already been done. The mere presence of this text indicates that Cartesianism was a force within the academy. The ultimate victory of the Cartesian philosophy is reflected in the fact that in 1720, the University of Paris instituted new statutes that incorporated Cartesian writings into the curriculum.32

30. On clear and distinct ideas, see Pourchot [1695] 1733, pp. 23–5; on the need to eliminate prejudices, see Pourchot [1695] 1733, p. 34. Moreover, Pourchot adopted the deviant Cartesian position that judgments involve an act of will; see Pourchot [1695] 1733, pp. 33–4, 183. 31. Pourchot explicitly distances himself from the account of the Eucharist in Descartes’ unpublished correspondence with Mesland. In 1671, the French Cartesian Robert Desgabets had involved himself in controversy by endorsing and developing this account in print. For discussion of Desgabets’ involvement in the French controversies over the Eucharist, see Schmaltz 2002, ch. 1. 32. In particular, the statutes recommend the use of Arnauld and Nicole’s Logique in matters pertaining to logic and the use of Descartes’ Meditations in matters pertaining to metaphysics; see Jourdain 1862–1866, 2:173v. The absence of any mention of physics perhaps reﬂects the fact that Cartesian physics already featured prominently in teaching at the University of Paris.

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But the question is why Pourchot’s scholasticized version of Cartesian- ism was able to triumph in this way. If scholasticism is preferred, why not just rely on its traditional non-Cartesian form? Here I want to propose in a preliminary way that Pourchot’s success depended on pressures from out- side the French universities. I think that the main source of the pressure was not the fact that Du Roure and Regis presented Cartesianism in a scholastic format, but rather the success of efforts to popularize Cartesian physics. Prior to 1660, French academics for the most part simply ignored the new Cartesian philosophy in whatever form it was presented.33 The main force for the promotion of Cartesianism in France was in fact a non-academic, Claude Clerselier. Clerselier inherited Descartes’ papers in 1653 and oversaw the publication of several of his works, starting with the first volume of his edition of Descartes’ correspondence in 1657. More- over, during the 1650s and 1660s there were non-academic outlets in France for the consideration of Descartes’ views. Thus, there were discussions of Cartesianism in informal French academies sponsored by Henri- Louis Habert Montmor (from 1653 to 1664)34 and the médecin cartésien Jean-Baptiste Denis (from 1664 to 1672). Perhaps most popular were the Mercredis of Rohault (from ca. 1659 to 1671), with Clerselier (Rohault’s father-in-law) reporting that Rohault’s demonstrations of Cartesian physics converted many, and that “a great number of persons of standing were found in this assembly (where the women even often held the first rank) and who never left without applause and admiration” (AT 5:758–59).35 Among the converts was Regis, who subsequently provided a version of Rohault’s Mercredis in the French provinces. Back in Paris, women also took the lead in the promulgation of Descartes’ views, with discussions of Cartesianism during the 1660s and 1670s in the salons of the comtesse de Grignan, the marquise de Sablé, and the duchesse du Maine.36 By means of these informal gatherings, there was a wide exposure to Descartes’ ideas, and such ideas began to work their way into the teaching of the universities of French religious orders and congregations, particularly those, such as the Benedictines and the Oratory, where fidelity to

33. For this point, especially with respect to the instruction of natural philosophy, see Brockliss 1992. 34. See the comment of the anti-Cartesian Pierre-Daniel Huet that “one believes that he [Montmor] had founded chez lui this gathering of philosophers in order to familiarize their mind with the doctrine of Descartes and to lead them little by little to share in it” (Huet 1810, p. 107). Though Montmor himself may have been sympathetic to Cartesianism, however, discussions at his academy involved an openness to several different views, including Aristotelian scholasticism; see Caps 2010, p. 149. 35. From the preface to the second volume of Clerselier’s edition of Descartes Lettres. 36. The classic discussion of the “Cartesian women” is Harth 1992.

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Augustine’s teachings was more important than an adherence to the Aristotelianism of the schools. There was some academic pushback to Cartesianism during the 1660s, as indicated by a 1665 disputation at the Jesuit collège de Claremont on the claim that “Cartesian hypotheses” are “distasteful to mathematics, philosophy, and theology.”37 These efforts cul- minated in an ofﬁcial order from Louis XIV in 1671 that the University of Paris adhere to its “rules and statutes” by prohibiting the teaching of anything that deviates from the traditional Aristotelian philosophy.38 It seems to me that the popular presentations of Cartesianism, and of Cartesian physics in particular, serve to explain why Cartesianism was increasingly seen as a threat to traditional instruction in the French universities. Such developments also indicate that the French agenda in physics was increasingly set not by the scholarly Latin tomes of the professors, but rather by popular works in French by non-academic Cartesian authors. One need think only of Rohault’s Traitéde physique (1671)—an important source for the discussion of physics in Regis’ manual—and Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), both written in French, both intended for a popular audience.39 The popularity of Cartesian physics out- side of the university gave it a vitality that the old scholastic physics just couldn’t match. Nonetheless, I think there is one aspect of the popular presentation of Cartesian physics that can help us to understand why it would have seemed congenial in a scholastic context. I do not have in mind here the “empir- icist” nature of later Cartesian physics that Ariew mentions at several points in First Cartesians and that has featured prominently in the recent literature (See Ariew 2014, pp. 137–49, 190–93).40 Rather, I am thinking of the fact that Cartesian physics, as popularly presented, had a distinc- tively “qualitative” character. As Alexandre Koyré has observed, the physics of Descartes’ Principia “is, in fact, as little mathematical as that of Aristotle” (Koyré 1939, 2:46). We do have the quantitative laws of motion in Part II of this text, but when we get to the details of Descartes’ natural philosophy in Parts III and IV, these laws are nearly absent. To be sure, there is the view that Rohault’s Traité was important for the early modern transition away from Descartes and toward a more Newtonian

37. As reported in a 1665 letter from Oldenburg to Boyle, in Oldenburg 1965–1986, 2:435. 38. For the text of the royal order, see Bouillier 1868, 1:469. For further discussion of the 1671 condemnation, see Schmaltz 2004. 39. There is the view in the literature that Fontenelle is not properly labeled a Cartesian; see, for instance, Marsak 1959 and Shank 2003. However, in Schmaltz 2017, §6.3.2, I argue that this view depends on a misguided understanding of Cartesianism. 40. For this emphasis in the recent literature, see, for instance, Dobre and Nyden 2013.

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form of physics. Thus, we have the recent claim of Mihnea Dobre that Rohault’swork“points to a lineage between French and English developments of natural philosophy in the second half of the seventeenth century” (Dobre 2013, p. 224). It is true that Rohault’s version of Carte- sian physics was linked to Newtonianism through Samuel Clarke’s annotated Latin translations of the Traité, the third and last edition of which appeared in 1710 (See Rohault 1710).41 In the various editions Clarke increasingly expanded his Newtonian footnotes to this text, thereby providing a basis for the comparison of Cartesian and Newtonian physics.42 What is questionable, however, is Dobre’s suggestion that Rohault’s Traité brings Cartesianism closer to Newtonianism. In fact, Rohault’s treatment of the experimental phenomena is no more quantitative than what we find in Descartes. In the extensive discussion of Copernican cosmology in Rohault’s Traité, for instance, there is no mention of Kepler’s three laws of motion, which of course are central to the cosmology of Newton’s Principia mathematica.43 Moreover, no more than Descartes did Rohault anticipate a Newtonian conception of physics in terms of the mathematical analysis of the forces involved in motion. Instead, we can say of Rohault what Gary Hatfield has claimed with respect to Descartes, namely, that he “accepted something similar to the Aristotelian conception of the subject-matter of physics,” which subsumes “not only the basic principles and properties of natural things and basic kinds, but also the subject-matters of what we might call physical astronomy, chemistry, biol- ogy, physiology and psychology” (Hatfield 1996, p. 118).44 For Rohault, as for Descartes, the main concern in natural philosophy was to propose hypothesized corpuscular replacements for the sort of forms and qualities to which the scholastics appealed in order to provide causal explanations of a wide variety of phenomena. From this perspective, the Cartesian physics of Descartes and Rohault appears to be more the successor of scholastic natural philosophy than the predecessor of Newtonian physics. It was the qualitative physics of Descartes and Rohault rather than Newton’s more quantitative physics that influenced the teaching of physics in the French universities at the start of the eighteenth century. Indeed, the critique of Cartesian vortical mechanics in Newton’s Principia went virtually unmentioned in French physics courses during the first two decades of

41. Rohault 1723 is John Clarke’s English translation of the Traité with an expanded version of his brother Samuel Clarke’s notes. 42. For this point, see Hoskin 1961. 43. For this extended discussion, which takes into account several post-Descartes discoveries, see Rohault 1671, 2:3–110. 44. Hatﬁeld is here criticizing what he takes to be a Newtonian conception of Descartes’ physics in Garber 1992 that restricts it to a consideration of body, motion and its laws.

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this century and was dismissed the few times it was mentioned during the following two decades (as indicated in Brockliss 1987, pp. 360–61). However, the matter was otherwise at the Paris Académie des sciences. The Académie underwent a major renovation in 1699, and under the influence of its permanent secretary, Fontenelle, it became the main center in France for the development of a more quantitative form of Cartesian physics. Those in the Académie who worked on this project did not have the luxury of ignoring the Newtonian critique. Indeed, early in the eighteenth century there was the project within the Académie of providing a quantitative analysis of fluid mechanics that serves to reconcile the Cartesian hypothesis of vortices with Kepler’s three laws of motion as well as with Newton’s inverse-square law. There were various proposals, but one in particular became dominant due to the influence of Nicolas Malebranche, who (along with Regis) was made an honorary member of the Académie during its 1699 renovation. In the 1712 edition of his Recherche de la vérité, Malebranche added an éclaircissement in which he proposes the replacement of the hard particles of the second element that composes the subtle matter of Descartes’ vortices with an infinity of smaller elastic vortices. He argues that this particular feature of the vortex allows one to account for Kepler’s third law, according to which the periodic times of the orbits of the planets are the 3/2 powers of their distances from the sun.45 A prominent proponent of Malebranche’s version of vortical mechanics was his fellow academician Joseph Privat de Molières. In his Leçons de physique (1734–1738), Privat claims that Malebranche’s new account of subtle matter provides the basis for a systematic Cartesian response to Newton and the Newtonians.46 PrivatwasaprofessorattheCollège Royale as well as a member of the Académie, and his version of vortical mechanics in fact came to be adopted in the French universities. As Laurence Brockliss has noted, after the publication of Privat’s Leçons the French academic debate in physics was “over the relative merits of Privat and Newton, not Newton and Descartes” (Brockliss 1987, p. 363). Indeed, given Privat’s considerable debt to Malebranche we can take the battle here ultimately to concern the relative merits of Malebranche and Newton. In conclusion, I want to return to the previously cited reference to “Malebranchistes et Pourchotistes” in the 1700 edition of the Arrêt burlesque. After mentioning this reference, Ariew observes that he could

45. Malebranche 1958–1978, 3:276–87. Malebranche was developing the attempt to accommodate Kepler’s third law in the Nouveau système ou nouvelle explication du mouvement des planets of the Lyon theologian and mathematician Philippe Villemot (Villemont 1707). For more on Malebranche’s theory, see Mouy 1934, pp. 310–14. 46. For the inﬂuence of Malebranche’s version of Cartesian vortical mechanics on Privat, see Brunet 1931, pp. 240–56; Aiton 1972, pp. 209–14; and Borghero 2012, pp. 103–37.

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have expanded his study by including a consideration of the influence of Pourchot and Malebranche (Ariew 2014, pp. xviii–xix). I take my remarks concerning the importance of Pourchot and Malebranche for the French academic reception of Cartesianism to provide an initial indication of just how one could draw on these figures to supplement Ariew’sstudy of “the first Cartesians.”

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