Six Metaphysical Meditations, with Hobbes's Objections and the Replies

Summary

This volume is the first English Meditations: William Molyneux's 1680 translation of Descartes's six Latin meditations of 1641, followed by the fifteen objections that Thomas Hobbes wrote against them (the third of the sets of objections printed with the Latin) and Descartes's answers to each. Molyneux, a young Dublin gentleman who later became a correspondent of Locke, prefaced it with a short life of Descartes and a defence of translating philosophy into plain English. The meditations take the form of six days of private reflection. On the first day the meditator resolves to overturn every opinion he once held, tests the senses against madness and dreaming, and finally supposes a powerful, crafty deceiver. On the second he finds that the deceiver cannot make him not exist while he thinks, defines himself as a thinking thing, and uses a piece of beeswax melting by the fire to show that even bodies are grasped by the understanding rather than by sight or touch. The third meditation argues from the idea of an infinite God, which a finite mind could not have produced, to God's existence and truthfulness. The fourth explains error as the will reaching beyond what the understanding clearly perceives. The fifth gives a second proof from the idea of a supremely perfect being, likened to the necessary link between a mountain and its valley. The sixth argues that bodies exist, that mind and body are really distinct, and yet that the mind is not lodged in the body like a sailor in a ship but closely joined to it, as pain, hunger and thirst testify. Hobbes answers as a materialist: thinking may belong to a body, reasoning may be only a joining of names, there is no idea of God or of substance, a 'great light in the understanding' is a metaphor that an obstinate man can claim as easily as a wise one, and God might deceive us for our good as a physician deceives a patient. Descartes's replies are brief and often impatient, but they sharpen his key distinctions between imagining and understanding, between a thing and its acts, and between essence and existence. Molyneux included only Hobbes's set, he says, because English readers would know the objector. The exchange lets students watch two of the century's ablest minds disagree about what a mind is, and judge the arguments rather than the reputations.

Plot or Argument

• Translator's preface and life of Descartes

  Molyneux, writing from Dublin in February 1679/80, defends a plain, literal style for a 'Physico-Mathematical Argumentation', urges repeated reading, sketches Descartes's life from La Flèche to Stockholm, and compares the six meditations to the six days of creation.

• Meditation I: Of Things Doubtful

  The meditator resolves to withdraw assent from anything open to doubt. He weighs the deceptions of the senses, the madman who thinks his head is glass, and the dreamer who thinks he sits by the fire, then grants that arithmetic seems certain until he supposes an omnipotent God, or else an evil spirit, bent on deceiving him.

• Meditation II: The thinking thing and the wax

  Like Archimedes seeking one fixed point, he finds that 'I am, I exist' is necessarily true whenever he thinks it. He is a thinking thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, imagines and senses. The melting beeswax shows that bodies are perceived by the mind's inspection, so the mind is better known than the body.

• Meditation III: Of God

  He takes clear and distinct perception as his rule of truth, sorts ideas into innate, adventitious and invented, and argues that the idea of an infinite substance must have a cause with at least as much reality as the idea represents. God has stamped this idea on him like a workman's mark; and since fraud depends on defect, God is no deceiver. The meditation closes in contemplation and adoration.

• Meditation IV: Of Truth and Falsehood

  Error is not a positive power given by God but a privation. It arises because the will, which is as wide as it can be, extends itself to things the understanding does not clearly perceive. Suspending judgment where perception is unclear is the remedy, and the meditator thanks God for gifts he was not owed.

• Meditation V: Of the essence of material things, and again of God

  The triangle has a true and immutable nature that the mind did not make. In the same way existence belongs to the idea of a supremely perfect being as inseparably as a valley belongs to the idea of a mountain. All certain knowledge, even in geometry, depends on knowing the true God.

• Meditation VI: Bodies, and the real distinction of mind and body

  Imagining a thousand-sided figure differs from understanding it, which suggests a body to which the mind applies itself. Because God is no deceiver and we have a strong inclination to believe that ideas come from bodies, bodies exist. Mind is indivisible and body divisible, so they are distinct, yet pain, hunger and thirst show their close union. He treats phantom-limb pain, the dropsical patient's thirst that worsens his illness, and the nerves running to the brain, then dismisses the dream doubt because waking experience is joined by memory to the rest of life.

• Hobbes's objections I-IV, against Meditations I-II

  Hobbes accepts the dream argument but calls it old. He argues that from 'I think' it does not follow that I am a mind rather than a body, since an act is not its subject ('I am walking, therefore I am a walk'); that we cannot separate thought from thinking matter; and that reasoning may be a concatenation of names, so that the mind would be motion in an organic body.

• Hobbes's objections V-XI, against Meditation III

  Hobbes denies that we have any idea of God, of an angel, of the soul or of substance, only images and reasonings; compares us to a man born blind who knows that something warms him and calls it fire; questions what 'more reality' could mean; and notes that if innate ideas were always present, sound sleepers would always think.

• Hobbes's objections XII-XVI and the replies

  On the fourth meditation Hobbes says that error needs a positive faculty, that free will is assumed against the Calvinists, and that the 'great light' is a metaphor. On the fifth he reduces essence apart from existence to a joining of names. On the sixth he asks whether God might deceive us for our good, as physicians and fathers do, and whether an atheist can know he is awake. Descartes replies that he means by 'idea' whatever the mind immediately perceives, that Frenchmen and Germans reason about the same things in different words, and that blindness is a defect without being a thing.

Characters

• The meditator, first-person narrator

  Descartes's 'I', a man who sets aside a quiet day to overturn his opinions, is tempted back to them by habit as a sleeping prisoner prefers his dream of liberty, and rebuilds knowledge from his own existence and the idea of God.

• Thomas Hobbes, objector

  English philosopher of Malmesbury, then in Paris, who reads the meditations as a materialist and nominalist: thought may be bodily motion, ideas are images, and reasoning joins names.

• René Descartes (respondent), author answering objections

  In the replies he speaks in his own voice, short and occasionally exasperated, complaining that he has not found one sound inference in the objections while restating what he means by idea, substance and reality.

• The evil deceiver, hypothesis

  A powerful and crafty spirit whom the meditator supposes to be deceiving him in everything, adopted as a discipline against habitual belief rather than asserted as real.

• William Molyneux, translator

  Dublin scholar (1656-1698) whose preface defends a literal 'rough' English, gives the earliest English sketch of Descartes's life, and explains why only Hobbes's objections are included.

Lessons

• Doubt as a discipline, not a resting place

  The meditator doubts in order to find what cannot be doubted, and he admits that his old opinions keep returning by force of habit. Doubt here is an exercise with a purpose and an end, carried out for 'Speculation' and not for 'Practice'. Students can distinguish methodical doubt from the settled scepticism that refuses to conclude anything.

  • Why does the meditator say his doubt concerns speculation and not the conduct of life, and is that limit consistent?
  • What work does the evil deceiver do that the dream argument cannot?
  • Hobbes says the dream argument is old news from Plato. Does Descartes's answer, that he uses it as a physician describes a disease he means to cure, satisfy you?

• What the wax teaches about knowing

  Every sensible quality of the wax changes by the fire, yet everyone agrees it is the same wax. Descartes concludes that we grasp bodies by the understanding, not by the senses or imagination, and that we see men in the street only by judging that hats and coats cover men. Hobbes reads the same example as proof that the subject of change is matter.

  • List what the meditator says remains of the wax after melting. Is 'extended, flexible and mutable' something you see?
  • How does the example of men seen from a window strengthen the argument?
  • Who uses the wax better, Descartes or Hobbes, and why?

• The will that outruns the understanding

  In the fourth meditation error is not God's fault but ours: the will is free and wide, the understanding finite, and we err when we affirm what we do not clearly perceive. Descartes says he is not blameless even when he guesses right. Hobbes objects that assent is not voluntary and that free will is assumed against the Calvinists; Descartes appeals to what every man experiences in himself.

  • Why does the meditator say a lucky guess is still blameworthy?
  • Is belief something we choose? Weigh Hobbes's claim that we believe strong arguments 'whether we will or no'.
  • How does the meditator's gratitude for gifts 'he owed me nothing' shape his account of human limits?

• Ideas, images and names

  The central quarrel is over the word 'idea'. Hobbes means a sensory image, so there can be no idea of God, an angel or the soul; Descartes means whatever the mind immediately perceives, including its own willing and fearing. Hobbes's further claim that reasoning joins names by the word 'is' draws Descartes's reply that a Frenchman and a German can argue about the same things in different words.

  • Does Hobbes's man born blind, who knows only that something warms him, have an idea of fire?
  • Is the Christian teaching that God is incomprehensible an argument against Descartes, as Hobbes says, or does Descartes's distinction between adequate and partial conception answer it?
  • Can you think about something you cannot picture? Give an example and test it against both men.

• Joined to the body like no sailor to his ship

  After arguing that mind and body are really distinct, the sixth meditation insists that pain, hunger and thirst are 'confused' modes of thought arising from their union. Descartes uses the amputee's phantom pain, the dropsical patient's thirst that worsens his disease, and a machine-like account of nerves to explain why a good God permits the senses sometimes to mislead. Students should weigh the distinction and the union together rather than reduce Descartes to either.

  • Why would a mind lodged in the body like a sailor in his ship not feel pain?
  • How does the clock that keeps time badly help Descartes answer the problem of the sick man who craves drink?
  • What does the meditation's last paragraph admit about 'the infirmity of our Nature'?

Context

Descartes circulated the Latin Meditationes de prima philosophia through Marin Mersenne in Paris, who collected objections from theologians and philosophers; the work appeared in Paris in 1641 with six sets of objections and replies and in Amsterdam in 1642 with a seventh. Hobbes, in Parisian exile from the English troubles, wrote the third set early in 1641; he was already developing the mechanical philosophy of De Corpore and De Homine. The two men had also quarrelled by letter over optics, and the replies show little warmth. A French version (by the Duc de Luynes, with objections translated by Clerselier) followed in 1647. Molyneux's English of 1680 came out of the Restoration interest in Descartes among English divines such as Henry More and Edward Stillingfleet, whom the preface names.

Composition

Descartes drafted metaphysical meditations in the Netherlands around 1639-1640, building on the fourth part of the Discourse on Method (1637). The dedicatory letter to the Faculty of Theology at Paris presents the proofs of God and of the soul's distinctness as rivalling geometrical certainty. Molyneux's translation (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1680) omits the dedication and the other objectors and keeps only Hobbes's set; the Project Gutenberg text (#70091) keeps the 1680 spelling and italics, with the errata corrected.

Reception

The Meditations became the founding text of modern philosophy of mind and the most contested Cartesian work. Hobbes's objections anticipate later materialist and nominalist answers to Descartes, and the exchange is still read as a clash of two programmes for the new science. Molyneux himself went on to found the Dublin Philosophical Society and to correspond with Locke, posing the 'Molyneux problem' about a blind man made to see. The work was chosen for the Great Books of the Western World (2nd ed., 1990), volume 28.

Comparisons

• Meditations on First Philosophy

  The library's other Meditations record treats the same six meditations through a modern translation. Molyneux's 1680 version is the one English readers of Locke's generation actually met, and it adds what that record lacks: Hobbes's objections, Descartes's replies and a translator's preface showing how Descartes was received in Restoration Britain and Ireland.

• Leviathan

  Leviathan (1651) opens with the materialist psychology Hobbes sketches in these objections: sense as motion in the organs, imagination as decaying sense, reasoning as the 'reckoning' of names. Reading the objections first shows the philosophy of mind on which Hobbes's politics rests.

• Discourse on Method

  Part IV of the Discourse gives the cogito and the proofs of God in a few pages written in French for a general reader. The Meditations slow the same path down into six days, add the deceiving spirit and the wax, and expose the argument to formal objection.

• The Passions of the Soul

  The sixth meditation leaves the union of mind and body as something experienced in pain, hunger and thirst. The Passions of the Soul (1649) works that union out physiologically, with animal spirits and the pineal gland, and is the natural next step for students interested in Descartes's medicine.

• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

  Locke rejects the innate ideas Descartes defends here, siding in part with Hobbes's objection about sound sleepers who do not think. Molyneux, Descartes's English translator, became Locke's friend and correspondent, so the two books are linked by a person as well as a problem.

• Proslogion

  The fifth meditation's proof from the idea of a supremely perfect being resembles Anselm's argument from 'that than which nothing greater can be conceived', though Descartes frames it with the triangle and the mountain and valley rather than with prayer. Molyneux's preface mentions those who say the Fathers anticipated Descartes and refers them to his replies.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The sixth meditation is a foundational text for the modern mind-body problem and for the mechanical picture of the body as a machine of 'Bones, Nerves, Muscles, Veins, Blood, and Skin'. Descartes draws on clinical examples: phantom-limb pain reported by amputees, the dropsical patient whose thirst worsens his disease, and pain referred along the nerves from foot to brain. Meditation I uses the humoral idea of madmen disturbed by a 'melancholick vapour' as a test case for doubt, which is a historical description of delusion, not a diagnosis. Hobbes's last objections raise the ethics of benevolent deception by physicians, and Descartes's first answer compares his use of doubt to a medical writer describing a disease before its cure. The translator's preface records that Descartes died in Stockholm of a peripneumonia, attributed at the time to night-time conversations with Queen Christina; later accounts differ, and the cause should be treated as the 1680 report.

• Meditation I, first doubt

  The meditator compares himself to madmen whose brains are disturbed by melancholic vapour, who believe they are kings, clothed in purple, or have heads of clay or glass, then turns to dreaming as a stronger reason for doubt.

  Madness Psychosis Humoral Medicine Dreams Nightmares
• Meditation I, second doubt

  Medicine ('Physick, both Natural and Medicinal') is listed among the sciences of compound things that are doubtful, unlike arithmetic and geometry.

  Physicians Doctors
• Meditation VI, review of reasons for doubt

  Pain felt by amputees in a limb they no longer have shows that even the inward sense of pain can mislead about where the body is affected.

  Pain Surgery Mind Body
• Meditation VI, union of mind and body

  Pain, hunger and thirst are called confused modes of thought arising from the union of mind and body, against the image of the soul as a mariner in a ship.

  Mind Body Pain
• Meditation VI, the dropsy and the clock

  The body considered as a machine of bones, nerves, muscles, veins, blood and skin; the dropsical patient's dry throat and a thirst that feeds his disease, compared with a clock that tells the hours wrongly, to ask how a good God permits nature to mislead.

  Mind Body Physicians Doctors
• Meditation VI, nerves and the brain

  Sensation from the foot is carried by nerves like cords through the medulla spinalis to the brain, so that a motion excited anywhere along the path is felt as pain in the foot; Descartes argues this arrangement is the best for preserving health.

  Mind Body Pain
• Meditation VI, conclusion

  Dreaming is distinguished from waking because dreams are never joined by memory with the rest of life; a sudden figure that vanished would be judged an apparition formed in the brain.

  Dreams Nightmares Psychology Unconscious
• Objection I and Answer

  Descartes says he could no more omit the old reasons for doubt than a writer in physic could skip the description of a disease whose cure he means to teach.

  Physicians Doctors
• Objection XV and Answer

  Hobbes cites physicians who deceive patients for their health as blameless; Descartes answers that his proof needs only that God cannot will to cheat us in a way contrary to his nature.

  Medical Ethics Physicians Doctors
• Translator's preface, life of Descartes

  Molyneux reports that Descartes died in Sweden on the seventh day of a peripneumonia, or inflammation of the lungs, thought to have been contracted in late bare-headed conversations with Queen Christina.

  Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Stage the third set of objections as a conversation in Mersenne's Paris lodgings in 1641, with Hobbes pressing 'I am walking, therefore I am a walk' and Descartes answering in his own words from the replies. Let Mersenne decide which point was left unanswered.

• Essay

  Hobbes complains that Descartes's replies are too brief, and Descartes says he found no right inference in the objections. Choose one exchange (on the wax, on the idea of God, or on free will) and argue who has the better of it, quoting both.

• Classroom

  Bring a candle stub or a piece of beeswax to class and melt it. Have students record every sensible quality before and after, then write a paragraph answering the meditator's question: what was it in the wax that was so evidently known?

• Fiction

  Write the evening of Meditation I from the point of view of the meditator's servant, who sees his master sitting by the fire in a winter gown, staring at his own hands.

Further Reading

• Meditations on First Philosophy, with Selections from the Objections and Replies, René Descartes, trans. John Cottingham

  Modern English with all seven sets of objections in selection, for comparison with Molyneux's wording.

• Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

  Chapters 1-5 set out the account of sense, imagination and reasoning behind the objections.

• The Passions of the Soul, René Descartes

  Descartes's physiology of the union of mind and body.

• Descartes: An Intellectual Biography, Stephen Gaukroger

  Places the Meditations and the objections in Descartes's scientific career.

• Descartes's Error, Antonio Damasio

  A neurologist's critique of Cartesian dualism; read it as a modern argument, not as an account of what Descartes held.