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Updated: September 4, 2025
Metaphysicians have never known how to extricate themselves from this difficulty. DESCARTES fancied he solved it by saying that beasts have no souls, but are mere machines. Nothing can be nearer the surface, than the absurdity of this principle.
But as M. Descartes has well observed, good sense is distributed to all: thus one must believe that both the orthodox and heretics are endowed therewith. Right reason is a linking together of truths, corrupt reason is mixed with prejudices and passions.
Thus, I repeat, Descartes in laying down the first principles of his philosophy created an intellectual basis for the external universe.
That he should fall into difficulties and inconsistencies is by no means surprising. He certainly believes that we perceive an external world of things, and the inconsistent way in which Descartes and Locke appeal from ideas to the things themselves does not strike him as unnatural. Why should not a man test his ideas by turning to things and comparing the former with the latter?
For want of sufficiently searching psychological investigations, Descartes was led to suppose that innumerable ideas, the evolution of which in the course of experience can be demonstrated, were direct or innate products of the thinking faculty.
Transplant the Tourangian, and his fine qualities develop and lead to great results, as we may see in many spheres of action: look at Rabelais and Semblancay, Plantin the printer and Descartes, Boucicault, the Napoleon of his day, and Pinaigrier, who painted most of the colored glass in our cathedrals; also Verville and Courier.
Grounded in Plato and impregnated with Descartes, he became a little later thoroughly infected with the Cabalistic philosophy that had entered Europe from the East. It was the point of view that he acquired in the study of this mystic Oriental system that gave the peculiar turn to his witchcraft notions, a turn which through his own writings and those of Glanvill found wide acceptance.
He had thus within his reach the works by which he strengthened his doctrine of intransitive intellectuality; they were Goethe's Memoirs; a volume of George Sand's correspondence, in which were the letters to Flaubert; the 'Discours de la Methode' by Descartes, and the essay by Burckhart on the Renaissance.
"I have often remarked, in many instances," writes Descartes, "that there is a great difference between an object and its idea." How could the man possibly have remarked this, when he had never in his life perceived the object corresponding to any idea, but had been altogether shut up to ideas?
"What!" said Michel; "you believe that they have artists like Phidias, Michael Angelo, or Raphael?" "Yes." "Poets like Homer, Virgil, Milton, Lamartine, and Hugo?" "I am sure of it." "Philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant?" "I have no doubt of it." "Scientific men like Archimedes, Euclid, Pascal, Newton?" "I could swear it."
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