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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.