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Updated: September 4, 2025
We may demur to the expression that space and time are forms of sensory intuition; but it imperfectly represents the great fact that co-existence and succession are mental phenomena not given in the mere sense experience. Descartes, OEuvres. Ed. Cousin, x. p. 71.
Moreover, it is not necessary that in order to be active one should be determined only by oneself, since a thing may receive direction without receiving force. So it is that the horse is controlled by the rider and the vessel is steered by the helm; and M. Descartes' belief was that our body, having force in itself, receives only some direction from the soul.
The proposition of Descartes that the body of a living man is a machine, the actions of which are explicable by the known laws of matter and motion, is unquestionably largely true.
While sensualism was gaining ground in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rationalism, having its roots in the Platonic system which had prevailed in the fifteenth and sixteenth, was remodeled under the influence of Descartes, Leibnitz, and Wolf, and opposed to the invading tendencies of its antagonist.
In other words, he had come to grasp the meaning of the first law of motion. It remained, however, for the great Frenchman Descartes to give precise expression to this law two years after Galileo's death. As Descartes expressed it in his Principia Philosophiae, published in 1644, any body once in motion tends to go on in a straight line, at a uniform rate of speed, forever.
"Have you not read that early in the seventeenth century there appeared in Paris the philosopher Descartes, accompanied by the figure of a beautiful woman? She moved, spoke, and seemed life itself; but Descartes declared she was an automaton, a masterpiece of mechanism he himself had made.
No doubt the premiss of the formula assumes the conclusion, but it likewise includes as well as assumes it. No doubt, since 'I think' is but another way of saying 'I am thinking, to say that 'I think' is to assume that 'I am; nay, the same thing is equally assumed by the mere introduction of the pronoun 'I. But Descartes was fully warranted in taking for granted the truth of his conclusion.
The brain, too, belongs to that world, and motions in the brain must be determined as a part of the material mechanism. In some way or other 'ideas' correspond to these motions; though to define the way tried all the ingenuity of Descartes' successors. In any case an idea is 'subjective': it is a thought, not a thing. It is a shifting, ephemeral entity not to be fixed or grasped.
I go back to the point from which we started, and to the other path of Descartes. I remind you that we have already seen clearly and distinctly, and in a manner which admits of no doubt, that all our knowledge is a knowledge of states of consciousness. "Matter" and "Force" are, so far as we can know, mere names for certain forms of consciousness.
Modern physiologists do not ascribe so exalted a function to the little pineal gland, but, in a vague sort of way, they adopt Descartes' principle, and suppose that the soul is lodged in the cortical part of the brain at least this is commonly regarded as the seat and instrument of consciousness. Descartes has clearly stated what he conceived to be the difference between spirit and matter.
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