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Updated: June 12, 2025
And as for the Cartesians I need not tell you, that they, supposing the Sensation of Light to bee produc'd by the Impulse made upon the Organs of Sight, by certain extremely Minute and Solid Globules, to which the Pores of the Air and other Diaphanous bodies are pervious, endeavour to derive the Varieties of Colours from the Various Proportion of the Direct Progress or Motion of these Globules to their Circumvolution or Motion about their own Centre, by which Varying Proportion they are by this Hypothesis suppos'd qualify'd to strike the Optick Nerve after several Distinct manners, so to produce the perception of Differing Colours.
The more Newton is revered, the less do people style themselves Newtonians; this word supposes that there are anti-Newtonians in England. Maybe we still have a few Cartesians in France; that is solely because Descartes' system is a tissue of erroneous and ridiculous imaginings. It is likewise with the small number of truths of fact which are well established.
And if they dare not say so they weaken the arguments whereby they endeavour to prove that matter is not capable of any activity. Nor do I believe that it is more difficult for M. Leibniz than for the Cartesians or other philosophers, to free himself from the objection of a fatal mechanism which destroys human liberty.
The conflict between the Gassendists and the Cartesians, which at first was a bitter one, centered, as far as physics was concerned, around the value of the atomic hypothesis as contrasted with the corpuscular and vortex theory which Descartes had opposed to it.
Each higher stage comprehends the lower, since even in spirits many perceptions remain obscure and confused. Hence it was an error when the Cartesians made thought or conscious activity by which, it is true, the spirit is differentiated from the lower beings to such a degree the essence of spirit that they believed it necessary to deny to it all unconscious perceptions.
We might, therefore, with great reason, accuse Descartes of atheism, seeing that he very effectually destroys the feeble proofs he adduces in support of his own hypothesis; we have solid foundation for insisting that his system overturns the idea of the creation, because if from the modification we subtract the subject, the modification itself disappears: and if, according to the Cartesians, this immateriality is nothing without nature, they are complete Spinosians, with another name.
Or if you wish one author only to suffice you, choose Dom François Lami, a Benedictine monk, and one of the strongest Cartesians to be found in France. You will find among his Philosophical Letters, printed at Trévoux in 1703, that one wherein by the geometricians' method he demonstrates "that God is the sole true cause of all that which is real."
But I certainly did not imagine that Theism was bound up with that theory; nor expected to be charged with denying Leibnitz and the Cartesians to be Theists because I denied that they held the theory. On The Composition Of Causes.
They are strong and almost unanswerable, but M. Leibniz's system does not lie more open to them than that of the Aristotelians; nay, I do not know whether the Cartesians would presume to say that God cannot communicate to our souls a power of acting. If they say so, how can they own that Adam sinned?
Rather more than a century and a half ago it was a scientific maxim, disputed by no one, and which no one deemed to require any proof, that “a thing can not act where it is not.” With this weapon the Cartesians waged a formidable war against the theory of gravitation, which, according to them, involving so obvious an absurdity, must be rejected in limine: the sun could not possibly act upon the earth, not being there.
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