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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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3. A few years after Kepler's discoveries, mechanism
triumphed over vitalistic dynamism in science and in
the formulation of celestial motions.

Descartes was not an astronomer, but his cosmology
wielded a powerful influence on thinkers in many
countries as well as in France (Principles of Philosophy,
Latin ed., 1644; French, 1647; Treatise on the World,
posthumous, 1664). With respect to imagination Des-
cartes's case is unique. He is undoubtedly classical
in his preference for the simplicity of basic premisses
and for the inflexible Rigor of fixed Laws. Space was
not absolute and the Void did not exist; Descartes
started with an infinitely divisible and inert matter.
Perfect motion, for Descartes, would be the kind that
is determined by the principle of inertia, not in a circle
but in a straight line. However, this motion is impossi-
ble in a Plenum in which no particle could be moved
without displacing another—whence the Vortex, and
whence by friction the formation of three kinds of
particles. The most tenuous or subtle matter immedi-
ately fills all empty spaces; this dust forms the suns
and their planets. In all this there is no scale of values
or importance. So Descartes constructed, starting from
an initial simplicity, a complicated, unstable system
which was as stifling for an imagination in love with
life and freedom as it was repugnant for the soul in
love with harmony.

This system seemed, nonetheless, to satisfy both the
rigorousness and the imagination of Descartes. The
numerous images that he employed (eels twisted on
the floor of a boat, straws in the eddies of a river) bear
witness to his bias for minute displacements which
reduce the universe to terrestrial models.

And yet Descartes did serve the cosmic imagination:
he contributed greatly to the vogue of astronomy at
the end of the seventeenth century. Since his was an
unlimited universe, he satisfied those sensibilities that
hungered for the infinite. As he brought in a great
variety of vortices in perpetual combination and sepa-
ration, he drew in his wake the lovers of change and
diversity. He revived the great dream of the plurality
of inhabited worlds. He created an impression of
intimacy among these systems which come in contact
with each other and modify one another. Finally, by
introducing a cooling off of the sun or the impact of
a comet, Descartes provided, in his lifeless cosmos, for
death as a stage of the life-process. The end of the
world, formerly considered a supernatural event, had
now become Nature's threat; and it had to do with
a theme of fascinating astronomical dreaming, as we
shall see.