The Dream of Descartes

Abstract

IN the five essays here translated into English (rather queer English in places) Prof. J. Maritain attacks the philosophy of Descartes ; in some ways very unfairly. The first essay deals with the ecstatic experience Descartes had as a young man ; an experience that is scarcely relevant to his philosophy, however important to him personally. Prof. Maritain, expanding hearsay (the only evidence available) with conjecture, decides that the upshot was, not a mathematical discovery as often supposed, but the notion of a single comprehensive science of complete certainty. In the second essay, in order to show that Descartes believed in such a science, he has to quote scraps from early unpublished work (“Regulæ”) and private letters. There is nothing about it in Descartes' mature published work. In any event, the idea was scarcely an innovation calculated to disrupt the unity of Christian thought, as Prof. Maritain suggests, since it is to be found in Plato's “Republic”, a book not without influence on Christendom. In the third essay the author objects, very eloquently, to Descartes' a priori theory of what theology ought to be, by opposing to it another equally a priori ; without stopping to consider the only relevant question, what, as a matter of history, theology is.