Abstract
There are two main reasons which make it difficult to discover the nature of knowledge. The first is that most people imagine that bodies are as capable of knowledge as minds and they gradually get so used to thinking of the act of knowing by comparison with accidents of matter that it is very difficult subsequently to get them to form a different idea of it and to teach them to distinguish the properties of one from the other. The second reason is that people almost always confuse the ideas or notions which the mind perceives immediatley with the physical species which are used by the imagination and the senses. That is why, having shown that bodies do not think and that they are completely deprived of knowledge, we should try to show what is the nature of the corporeal species which come from objects and are received in the sense organs, and what is the nature of those ideas or intellectual and spiritual notions which our mind perceives in order to think.
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Reference
For Descartes’s use of the term ‘idée’ to denote both physical patterns in the brain and their mental counterparts, see the Treatise on Man, trans. T. S. Hall, pp. 86–7 (notes 135, 136); Third Meditation, AT VII, 36 ff; CSM II, 25 ff. See also La Forge’s comments in the first edition of L’Homme (p. 349).
Cf. Descartes, Second Replies to Objections, AT VII, 160: CSM II, 113; ‘By the word “idea” I understand the form of any thought by the immediate perception of which I am conscious of the thought itself. Thus I cannot express anything in words and understand what I am saying without, by that very fact, being certain that I have an idea of whatever is meant by those words.’
Treatise on Man, Part V, 66 ff.
Hieronymi Fracastorii Veronensis, Opera Omnia (Venice: apud luntas, 1555): Turrius sive De Intellectu Dialogus, Bk. 1, p. 166 B-C: ‘Understanding certainly seems to be nothing but the representation of an object by means of the reception of a species of the object in the interior of the soul.’
Cf. Descartes, Dioptrics, Discourse I, AT V, 85: CSM I, 153–4; ‘your mind will be delivered from all those little images flitting through the air, called “intentional forms,” which so exercise the imagination of the philosophers.’
Cf. Descartes, Meditations, AT VII, 40–42: CSM II, 28–9.
Cf. E. Gilson, Index Scolastico-cartésien, text. no. 170.
Cf. for example Lucretius, who speaks of `simulacra rerum,’ (i.e. images of things) `which, like films stripped from the outermost body of things, fly forward and backward through the air.’ Titi Lucreti Cari, De Rerum Natura, ed. C. Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 3 vols.; Bk. IV, lines 34–6, vol. I, 363.
Comments on Descartes’ Treatise on Man, 1664 ed., especially pp. 351 ff.
Cf. Treatise on Man, Part V, arts. 67–68.
Cf. Treatise on Man, AT XI, 176–7: And note that I say will imagine or will sense“ inasmuch as I wish to include under the designation idea all impressions that spirits receive in leaving gland H; and these are all to be attributed to the common sense when they depend on the presence of objects, but can also proceed from several other causes, as I shall later explain…’ (Eng. trans., T. S. Hall, p. 87).
Here La Forge quotes in Latin, from the Second Replies to Objections, AT VII, 161: `sed tantum quatenus mentem ipsam in illam cerebri partem conversam informant’ On so far as these images are in the corporeal imagination, that is, are depicted in some part of the brain, I do not call them “ideas” at all; I call them “ideas” only in so far as they inform the mind itself which applies itself to that part of the brain.’ CSM II, 113 ).
AT IV, 112; CSM I, 165.
Cf. Pierre Chanet, Traité de l’Esprit de l’Homme et de ses fonctions, Bk. I, ch. 3, pp. 8–21.
Descartes, Dioptrics, Discourse IV, AT V, 112–13; CSM 1, 165.
Descartes, Treatise on Light, AT XI, 5–6; The World, trans. by M. S. Mahoney ( N.Y.: Abaris Books, 1979 ), 1–3.
Chanet, Traité de l’Esprit, Bk. 11, ch. 7, pp. 150–51. In referring to Descartes’ argument about the conventional nature of words as signs of ideas, Chanet identifies him anonymously as `another modem author’ whom he had recently read.
Cf. Descartes, Sixth Meditation, AT VII, 72; CSM II, 50.
Bucolics, I, l: `Titire, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi.’
Fracastoro, De intellectione, Bk. I, 169 D.
Descartes, Comments on a Certain Manifesto, AT VIII-2, 358–61: CSM 1, 304–5. La Forge’s French citation omits a number of phrases or complete sentences from the original Latin text and I have indicated these by ellipses.
This seems to be quoted by La Forge from Heereboord, rather than directly from Aristotle’s De Anima. Cf. Adriaan Heereboord, Meletemata Philosophica (1665): Disputationes exphilosophia selectae, thesis VII, pp. 163–4. On p. 164 he quotes Aristotle as saying `oportet intelligentem speculari phantasmata.’
Cf. Descartes, Meditations, AT VII, 37 ff; CSM II, 25 ff.
The text includes both the Latin phrase `divinae quasi particula mentis’ and a French translation. Cf. Descartes to Chanut, 1 February 1647, AT IV, 608: CSMK III, 309; `our soul’s nature resembles his [i.e. God’s] sufficiently for us to believe that it is an emanation of his supreme intelligence, a “breath of divine spirit”.’ (The embedded quotation is from Horace, Satires, II, ii, 79)
Quoted in Latin: ‘intelligendo fit omnia.’ Cf. Aristotle, De Anima, passim.
Cf. Descartes, Comments on a Certain Manifesto, AT VIII-2, 360: CSM I, 305: `one thing can be said to result from another either because the other thing is its proximate and primary cause without which it could not exist, or becasue it is only its remote and accidental cause, viz. that which provides an occasion to the primary cause to produce its effect at one time rather than another.’
Cf. Descartes, Principles, Part I, art. 45, AT VIII-1, 22: CSM I, 207–8: `I call a perception clear when it it present and accessible to an attentive mind, in the same way as we say that we see things clearly when they are present to our eye when it is looking and, while it is open, they strike it strongly enough. However I call a perception distinct which, when it is clear, is so separated and so disconnected from all other perceptions that it evidently contains nothing which is not clear.’
Descartes, Meditations, AT VII, 67: CSM II, 46, `whenever I choose to think about the first and highest being and, as it were, to draw out the idea of God from the treasury of my mind…’ See also Annotations to the Principles, AT XI, 655: ‘I do not understand that they [innate ideas] are always actually depicted in some part of my mind, as many verses are in a book of Virgil.’
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De La Forge, L. (1997). Corporeal Species, and Intellectual Ideas or Notions. In: Treatise on the Human Mind (1664). International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, vol 153. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3590-2_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3590-2_10
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