

    Cliché Musées Nationaux, Paris

The Cartesian system

Metaphysically and epistemologically, Cartesianism is a species of rationalism, because Cartesians hold that knowledge—indeed, certain knowledge—can be derived through reason from innate ideas. It is thus opposed to the tradition of empiricism, which originated with Aristotle (384–322 bce) and according to which all knowledge is based on sense experience and is therefore (because sense experience is fallible) only probable. In practice, however, Cartesians developed probabilistic scientific theories from observation and experiment, as did empiricists. Cartesians were forced to satisfy themselves with uncertainty in science because they believed that God is omnipotent and that his will is entirely free; from this it follows that God could, if he so wished, make any apparent truth a falsehood and any apparent falsehood—even a logical contradiction—a truth. The human intellect, by contrast, is finite; thus, humans can be certain only of what God reveals and of the fact that they and God exist. Descartes argues that one has certain knowledge of one’s own existence because one cannot think without knowing that one exists; this insight is expressed as “Cogito, ergo sum” (Latin: “I think, therefore I am”) in his Discourse on Method (1637) and as “I think, I am” in his Meditations (1641). In the Meditations, Descartes also argues that because we are finite, we cannot generate an idea of infinity, yet we have an idea of an infinite God, and thus God must exist to cause us to have that idea. He also says that although we have no direct acquaintance with the material world, not even with our own bodies, but only with ideas that represent the material world, we cannot know the material world directly. We know it exists only because God is not a deceiver.


This dualism of mind and matter gives rise to serious problems concerning causal interaction and knowledge. Given that mind and matter are so radically different, how can the body cause the mind to have sensible ideas? Likewise, how can the mind cause the body to move? How can the mind know the material world by way of sensible ideas, which are mental? In other words, how can ideas represent the properties of material objects, given that mind and matter are essentially distinct? Various lines of Cartesian philosophy developed from different answers to these questions.

Descartes’s philosophy is rooted in his mathematics. He invented analytic geometry—a method of solving geometric problems algebraically and algebraic problems geometrically—which is the foundation of the infinitesimal calculus developed by Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). The method discussed in his Discourse on Method is basically an extension of analytic mathematical method, which he applies to all branches of science.

Cartesian mechanism

The first Cartesians were Dutch and French physicists and physiologists who attempted to explain physical and biological phenomena solely in mechanistic terms—i.e., solely in terms of matter and its motion and especially without appeal to Aristotelian notions such as form and final cause. Descartes’s first disciple in the Netherlands, Henricus Regius (1598–1679), taught Cartesian physics at the University of Utrecht—though, to Descartes’s chagrin, he dismissed Descartes’s metaphysics as irrelevant to science. Another disciple, the French theologian and philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), believed with Descartes that animals are merely machines and thus incapable of thought or feeling; he is said to have kicked a pregnant dog and then to have chastised critics such as Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95), the French writer of animal fables, for expending their emotions over such inconsiderable creatures rather than concerning themselves with human misery. In Paris, the lectures of Pierre-Sylvain Régis (1632–1707) on Cartesian physics—which he accompanied with spectacular demonstrations of physical phenomena such as optical illusions—created such a sensation that Louis XIV forbade them. Because Cartesianism challenged the traditional Aristotelian science, which was supported by the Roman Catholic Church, and because the church also stood behind the so-called “divine right” of kings to rule, the king feared that any criticism of traditional authority might give rise to revolution. (Later, in the 18th century, Descartes’s emphasis on the ability of each individual to think for himself lent support to the cause of republicanism.)

Advancements in mechanical arts and crafts provided the practical foundation of Cartesian mechanism. In the 17th century, mechanical inventions such as statues that walked and talked by application of levers and pullies and organs that played by waterpower were well known. The mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62) invented a calculating machine based on principles worked out by clock makers and inventors of spinning and knitting machines, such as the Englishman William Lee. The first inventors directly inspired by Descartes were the French craftsman Jean Ferrier, who attempted to make hyperbolic lenses according to Descartes’s designs, and Étienne de Villebressieu, who with Descartes’s collaboration developed an improved water pump.

Test Your Knowledge
What’s In a Name? Philosopher Edition

Mechanism was promoted by one of Descartes’s contemporaries, the mathematician and philosopher Marin Mersenne (1588–1648). Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) attempted to derive it theoretically from the atomism of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 bce), who held that reality is ultimately constituted of “atoms” in motion in the “void.” Motion was first studied scientifically by the Italian mathematician and astronomer Galileo (1564–1642).

According to Descartes, the material universe consists of an indefinitely large plenum of infinitely divisible matter, which is separated into the subtle matter of space and the denser matter of bodies by a determinate quantity of motion that is imparted and conserved by God. Bodies swirl like leaves in a whirlwind in vortices as great as that in which the planets sweep around the Sun and as small as that of tiny spinning globes of light. All bodily joinings and separations are mechanical, resulting from the collisions of other moving bodies. Because the amount of motion is conserved according to the laws of nature, the Cartesian material world exhibits a kind of determinism. After the initial impulse, the world evolves lawfully. If the speeds and positions of all the whirling portions of matter in the universe at any one moment could be completely described, then a complete description of their speeds and positions at any later time could be deduced through calculations based on the laws of motion. Of course, only God has the infinite intellect required for performing these calculations.

Although God is the primary cause of the existence of the material universe and of the laws of nature, all physical events—all movements and interactions of bodies—result from secondary causes—that is, from bodies colliding with each other. God stands merely for the uniformity and consistency of the laws of nature. This led Blaise Pascal to complain that the only purpose God serves in Descartes’s system is to initiate motion in the material world and to guarantee its conservation and the uniformity of nature.

Cartesianism was criticized in England by the Platonist philosopher Henry More (1614–87) and was popularized by Antoine Le Grand (1629–99), a French Franciscan, who wrote an exposition of the Cartesians’ ingenious account of light and colour. According to popular versions of this account, light consists of tiny spinning globes of highly elastic subtle matter that fly through the air in straight lines and bounce like balls at angles consistent with the optical laws of reflection and refraction. Different colours are caused by the globes’ different speeds and spins, which themselves are determined by the texture of the surfaces on which the globes are reflected, refracted, or transmitted. The spectrum of colours observed when light passes through a triangular prism is explained by the fact that the globes pass more slowly through thicker parts of the prism than they do through thinner ones. The same spectrum of colours occurs when light passes through thicker and thinner parts of raindrops, giving rise to rainbows. Although Newton and Leibniz later showed that the simple mechanistic principles underlying these accounts were incapable of explaining the forces of gravitation and chemical bonding, it is noteworthy that the Cartesian theory of light is similar in principle to the contemporary view, according to which the different colours are produced by light at different wavelengths.

By the end of the 17th century, most of Cartesian physics had been superseded by Newtonian mathematical physics. Cartesians admitted that Descartes’s laws of motion were wrong and that his principle of the conservation of motion should be abandoned in favour of Newton’s principles of the conservation of energy, or vis viva (Latin: “living force”), and linear momentum. Although the Treatise (1671) of Jacques Rohault, a leading expositor of Cartesian physics, was translated into English in 1723 by Newton’s disciple Samuel Clarke (1675–1729) and Clarke’s brother, their corrections and annotations turned the work into an exposition of Newtonian physics. Nevertheless, this progress would have pleased Descartes, who said that the advancement of scientific knowledge would take centuries of work.

Mechanism versus Aristotelianism

Cartesian mechanism was opposed to scholastic Aristotelian science, which was supported by both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians. These thinkers held that, because all things are created by God with a given nature, there can be no evolutionary development of animals or of the universe as a whole. For Aristotle, all living things possess a spirit or “soul,” which is the form, or organizing principle, of the matter out of which the organism is composed, as well as the source of its powers of growth and development, nutrition, perception, and (in humans) cognition. The soul is the essence, or nature, of the organism and its final cause—i.e., its purpose, or goal. Thus, the development of an acorn into an oak tree is explained by the fact that the acorn possesses a form that directs it toward this end.

Descartes rejected both the teleological, animistic view and the related theory of alchemy that there are vital forces in things. Cartesians denied the existence of what they considered occult or magical forces, insisting instead that only God and humans have spirits, wills, purposes, and ends. They conceived both animate and inanimate bodies as having no goals but as simply being pushed around passively. For Cartesians, science therefore consisted of looking not for final causes but rather for the laws that govern the motions of bodies.

By insisting on human free will, Descartes placed the human soul or mind, like God, outside deterministic nature. Because the body is a part of nature, however, the mind’s evident ability to control the body’s movements is, on Cartesian assumptions, inexplicable and miraculous and thus inconsistent with mechanistic determinism. Ironically, in Descartes’s system this ability is itself an occult or magical force.

Mind, body, and humanity

Most Cartesians believed that the mind and body interact. When asked how this is possible, Régis gave the standard Cartesian reply: human beings experience the interaction, and God can and does make it take place, even if we cannot understand how. As for the question of how ideas represent objects, Rohault spoke for all Cartesians when he asserted that God can make ideas represent material bodies without resembling them; no further explanation is necessary. In both of these replies, the Cartesians can be seen to abdicate philosophy for mysticism and theology.

According to the Thomists (adherents of the Aristotelian philosophical and theological system developed by St. Thomas Aquinas), the soul or mind is the form of the body. Although for Aristotle the form of an object is inseparable from the matter of which it is made, the Thomists held that the human soul is a “substantial form” that is miraculously able to exist independently of matter and thus to survive the death of the body. Descartes, by contrast, contended that the notion of substantial form is contradictory, because it assumes the separate existence of something that by definition can exist only in unity with matter. For Cartesians, the mind or soul is a substance existing in itself, independently of matter; thus, they were able to explain immortality without having to rely on the dubious assumption that the soul-form is a kind of substance. This view, however, creates a serious problem concerning the ultimate nature of human beings. According to Cartesians, sensible ideas arise from the union of mind and body for the sole purpose of preserving the body by presenting harmful things as painful and beneficial things as pleasurable. Human beings learn by experience what to seek and to avoid, and the memory of these experiences is preserved in the brain. Once the body dies, however, both the need for sensible ideas and their memory traces in the brain are destroyed. All the soul knows of matter after death is the general idea of extension. Because all bodily associations and memories are eliminated, however, individual personality is lost; each human being survives death only as an impersonal soul, identical to all other bodiless souls. Like the notion that animals are mere machines, the Cartesian conclusion that the sensible manifestations of this life are neither continued nor remembered in the next was unpopular.

Science and religion

In addition to the dualism of mind and matter in Cartesian metaphysics, there is a more general dualism in Cartesianism as a whole between a rationalist metaphysics and epistemology, which entails the existence of innate ideas of mind, matter, and God and the possibility of obtaining certain knowledge through reason, and an empiricist (and mechanistic) physics, according to which scientific knowledge, which is never certain, is gradually accumulated through observation and experience of the material world. Descartes’s insistence on the possibility of certain knowledge of God’s existence has led some commentators to present him primarily as an apologist for Christianity. Others, however, have argued that he was really an atheist and a materialist who made arguments for God’s existence only to protect himself from persecution by the church.

Although Descartes publicly denied an interest in theology, in letters he offered mechanistic explanations of transubstantiation. According to the Thomistic account of this mystery, the forms of bread and wine are miraculously sustained as substantial forms while their matter is replaced by Christ’s flesh and blood. Rohault appealed to the Cartesian view that sensible ideas are caused by configurations of the parts of material bodies to argue that, if bread and wine were replaced by flesh and blood whose parts had exactly the same configurations, the flesh and blood would look, feel, and taste like bread and wine. Although Rohault’s account still requires the miraculous replacement of bread and wine by flesh and blood, it does not rely on the self-contradictory notion of substantial form.

A deterministic Cartesian ethics was developed by the Flemish Calvinist philosopher Arnold Geulincx (1624–69). In his view, although one can do only what God has willed, one is free to accept what one must do willingly or unwillingly. Virtue consists in the humble, diligent, and obedient acceptance of the justice of God’s decrees in the light of reason, whereas sin and evil result from an egotistic (and futile) stand against God. This Stoic ethics, with its affinity to Calvinist and Jansenist predestinarianism, is as deterministic as Cartesian physics. It does, however, contradict Descartes’s claim that the human will is free not just to accept or reject the rightness of predetermined bodily actions but also to choose and cause particular actions.

Malebranche and occasionalism

The most important philosophical work stemming directly from Descartes’s writings is The Search After Truth (1674–75), by Malebranche. His position, known as occasionalism, was adopted also by Geulincx and the French philosopher Géraud de Cordemoy. Malebranche was convinced by the argument—urged most strongly by the French skeptic Simon Foucher—that, because they are so radically different, Cartesian mind and matter cannot interact. Malebranche held that, on every occasion when human bodies interact with the world, God provides the appropriate sensible ideas in human minds. And, on every occasion when human minds will that their bodies move, God makes them move. Thus, there is no direct causal interaction between mind and body; there are only separate but parallel sequences of mental and material events intermediated by God.

  • Malebranche, engraving by de Rochefort, 1707
    Malebranche, engraving by de Rochefort, 1707
    Archives Photographiques, Paris

Foucher also argued that, because sensible ideas cannot resemble material things, they cannot represent them either, and they thus cannot be a source of knowledge of the material world. In other words, because sensible ideas such as colours, tactile feelings, sounds, odours, and tastes—as they are experienced by the mind—are utterly unlike the properties of material bodies, which are limited to size, shape, position, and motion or rest, it follows that these ideas cannot give knowledge of the material world as it really is. In response, Malebranche, like Descartes before him, simply denied that ideas must resemble their objects to represent them. Regarding the possibility that one might have sensible ideas of a nonexistent world, Malebranche said tersely that the first chapter of Genesis assures the existence of the material world. As to how human ideas of this world are true, Malebranche offered the Platonic view that ideas of all things reside in God and that, on appropriate occasions, God illuminates these ideas for human observation. Thus, human beings see all things in God and can rest assured in his goodness.

Despite Descartes’s influence on his thought, Malebranche denied that he was a Cartesian. Unlike Descartes, he argued that introspection gives no knowledge of the essence of the mind. This view prompted the English empiricist philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) to suggest that, for all human beings know, matter might be able to think. All Cartesians opposed this possibility, however, because the essential difference between mind or soul and body supports the Christian doctrine that the human soul survives the body’s death.

  • MLA
  • APA
  • Harvard
  • Chicago
You have successfully emailed this.
Error when sending the email. Try again later.
Edit Mode
Table of Contents
Tips For Editing




Thank You for Your Contribution!



Uh Oh


Keep Exploring Britannica

Yoga instructor demonstrating a pose.
Hypatia of Alexandria
Odd Facts About Philosophers
Nietzsche, 1888.
Jacques Derrida, 2001.
Brain Games: 8 Philosophical Puzzles and Paradoxes
The Axial Age: 5 Fast Facts
John Dewey.
What’s In a Name? Philosopher Edition
iceberg illustration.
Nature: Tip of the Iceberg Quiz
The Norns at the foot of the World Tree, Yggdrasil.
Email this page