Descartes Read online

  The Archdukes hired Spinola to lead their army—a bold choice, because Spinola was a banker from Genoa and had never had military experience; people joked that he was a general before he was a soldier, and this was perfectly true. But he turned out to be a general of genius, and caused the United Provinces considerable anxiety before, in 1609, helping the Archdukes to arrange a twelve-year truce with them, which effectively recognised the United Provinces' independence. This move infuriated Phillip II's successor as King of Spain, Phillip III, who hated the idea of peace with the rebel Dutch Calvinists. But he was in no position to insist: Spain was bankrupt and unable to raise further loans, and moreover was on the brink of war with Venice, a most uncomfortable combination. After some enforced reflection, Phillip III was made to see that a dozen years of peace in the Netherlands might help to rebuild Spanish finances; the Dutch (so the Archdukes and Spinola told him soothingly) could be reconquered thereafter.

  When Descartes arrived in Breda, therefore, in the summer of 1618, the United Provinces had been at peace with its Catholic neighbour for nine years, and no military adventures were immediately in prospect. But the United Provinces was in a turbulent state politically. Maurice of Nassau had just succeeded to the Princedom of Orange in that year, having previously been Count Maurice of Nassau. He was captain-general of the federal army and Stadhouder of five of the seven free provinces (his cousin William-Louis was Stadhouder of the other two). Already some transprovincial institutions had grown up: the mint, the council of state for military affairs, the admiralty, and an audit board. But each of the seven provinces had its own independent assembly, each of which in turn sent delegates to the federal assembly, called the States-General. This was a small body, consisting usually of fewer than a dozen members. All its decisions had to be referred back to the provincial assemblies for ratification—a time-consuming and frequently divisive business, not least because the provincial assemblies themselves had to consult the magistrates of their larger towns and the nobility in their rural areas before reaching any decisions.

  This might have been a recipe for more paralysis and divisiveness if the richest province, Holland, in virtue of providing two-thirds of the United Provinces' tax revenue, had not usually had its way in most decisions, even major ones opposed by some of the other provinces. That in fact was what happened when the truce with the Archdukes was pending in 1609: some provinces, their hard-line Calvinist clergy to the fore, were as opposed to peace as Spain's Phillip III himself, and for mirror-image reasons. Also the United Provinces had enjoyed the expertise and canniness for some years of the States-General's leading permanent official, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, who with the aid of a trusty standing committee arranged the agenda for meetings, before which he negotiated, cajoled, persuaded and twisted arms, and during which he took the chair—thus observing (or trying to) Sun Tzu's advice only to go into battle when the victory has already been won.

  Still, among so much fissiparating potential there was sure to be something really dangerous to the internal peace and unity of the Provinces, and—inevitably, one must suppose—religion provided it. In 1605 two theologians at the University of Leiden fell out over the question of predestination. One, a strict and zealous Calvinist called Francis Gomarus, held that each individual's salvation or damnation had been predestined from the beginning of time. Jacob Arminius, a liberal Reformed theologian, held that human beings had free will. Professors and students took sides; so eventually did the cloth workers of Leiden; and neither academics nor clothworkers were above throwing stones and breaking heads in defence of their preferred view. As civil unrest welled up, Oldenbarnevelt grew concerned; he called together a meeting of leading clergy to discuss a revision of the Reformed Church's Catechism and Confession of Faith, in order to settle matters. The clergymen angrily refused to consider changing the Confession, which to them was sacrosanct, and they told Oldenbarnevelt that the civil authorities must not dare to interfere with matters of doctrine.

  All this happened during the first decade of the seventeenth century, at the end of which Arminius died. But his followers were determined to continue the fight. They presented a "Remonstrance" to the assembly of the leading province, Holland, calling for a revision of the Confession of Faith, and demanding that church and state matters be kept completely separate. The Gomarists hit back with a "Counter-Remonstrance," which included a demand that all Arminians should be discharged from their teaching and preaching posts. The Arminians asked Oldenbarnevelt for his help; the great jurist Hugo Grotius, then chief magistrate of Rotterdam, attacked the Gomarists for threatening the safety of the state, the church's unity, and worst of all the principle of freedom of conscience.

  What made matters worse from the Gomarist point of view was that Roman Catholics, or at any rate most of them, were also believers in free will. In the pro-Gomarist section of the public mind this put Arminians into the same unspeakably vile category as Catholics. As a result Arminian ministers and their churches were attacked by mobs. Riots and disorder increased, and began to spread to other matters besides, as when in 1616 Delft saw several days of rioting over corn taxes, during which barricades were erected in the streets and the houses of the rich were stoned.

  Maurice of Nassau began to tell his friends that the dispute over predestination would only be settled by civil war. He and Oldenbarnevelt disagreed about how matters should be handled. Indeed, they quarrelled; and the quarrel brought into the open the real difference between them. Oldenbarnevelt was an Arminian, Maurice a Gomarist; and he then publicly took the Gomarists' side. As a result their cause began to get the upper hand. In towns with an Arminian preacher large crowds marched out to places where they could hear a Gomarist minister instead. Harassment of Arminians increased, and Maurice instructed his troops to do nothing to protect them.

  As matters grew worse Oldenbarnevelt decided that he had to act in the interests of public order. He persuaded the assembly of Holland to authorise each town in the province to raise waardgelders, in effect police or militia companies, if the local authorities thought they were necessary. The waardgelders were to swear loyalty to the town. At the same time, unfortunately for Oldenbarnevelt, but not for all, the proclamation stated that soldiers in the federal army who were paid by Holland had a primary loyalty to Holland rather than to the whole United Provinces. This provision incensed Maurice; he saw it as a personal affront, and a direct challenge to his power. Under his direction, the States-General voted by five provinces to two to disband the waardgelder companies and he immediately put the order into effect, going with a large force to Utrecht and disarming its waardgelders, and then purging the city of Arminians and installing Gomarists in their place. That happened in July 1618; in August the towns of Holland submitted to Maurice, who repeated what he had done at Utrecht, at the same time placing Oldenbarnevelt and Hugo Grotius under arrest.

  These events were unfolding just as the young Descartes arrived in the United Provinces in the summer of 1618. Given that the whole of Europe had been watching agog as the quarrel between Arminians and Gomarists heated to a boiling point, Descartes could not possibly have been unaware of the tense situation prevailing there. Nor could he have been unaware that an important crisis in the affair was impending. Nowhere else in Europe were such matters at that moment so delicately poised, or so important to the fate of Reformation and Counter-Reformation alike.

  What Prince Maurice did next effectively settled the future of the Dutch republic in both its religious and political character, and influenced the course of European history. He convened a great assembly of Calvinist divines, with representatives from Germany, Switzerland and England joining their Dutch counterparts in a general synod at Dort (otherwise known as Dordrecht). After debates lasting six months, the synod condemned Arminians as heretics and as "disturbers of the peace" both in church and state. Instantly, about two hundred Dutch Arminian ministers were dismissed from their posts, nearly half of whom went into exile. Maurice also sacked Oldenb
arnevelt's followers in official posts in all the provinces, replacing them with new and inexperienced personnel, by this means drawing more power into his own hands. Grotius was sentenced to life imprisonment (he escaped two years later), and Oldenbarnevelt was condemned to death. He went the very next day, 13 May 1619, to the scaffold, carrying himself with great dignity. He was seventy-two years of age.

  These events were watched with thrilled interest all over Europe, which by and large accepted Maurice's representation of the affair as an attempt by Oldenbarnevelt and his Arminian supporters to seize power. It had indeed been a power struggle, for Maurice himself was intent on strengthening his grip on the United Provinces and had ambitions to be named King. Oldenbarnevelt stood in the way of that hope—although as matters proved, so did the republican instincts of the Dutch in general. Still, Dutch painters depicted the surrender of the waardgelders as military victories for Maurice. Within months the English playwrights John Fletcher and Philip Massinger had brought their "Sir John Van Olden Barnevelt" to the stage in London. Merchants there and elsewhere in Europe—and in certain of the other Dutch provinces too—were delighted that the old statesman had gone, because his canny policies had advantaged the merchants of Holland at their expense. And Calvinists everywhere believed that their view of Christianity had a great new champion in Maurice and that they were therefore poised to prevail.

  But with the experienced Oldenbarnevelt gone, and the less canny Maurice supreme in the United Provinces, this rejoicing was not merely premature but misplaced. What it really meant was that Spain, and by extension the Habsburg cause, had been given a marvellous chance to wrest back the initiative in international affairs. And just at that moment in 1618-19 events elsewhere in Europe were building towards an explosion of the volatile elements brewed by religious differences.

  So why was it that Descartes chose to go to the United Provinces in the summer of 1618, in the middle of the great upsets taking place there, as a volunteer in the army of the United Provinces, stationed in one of that army's main training depots? On the face of it there are good innocuous answers. One is that he wished to benefit from a solid grounding in the science of military engineering, in an army which was regarded as one of the most modern and effective of the day as a result of Maurice's innovations. Another is that he went to join one of the two French regiments in Maurice's army, led respectively by Baron de Courtmour and Gaspard de Chastillon. The regimental lists have long been lost, so no independent confirmation of this can be made; and neither Descartes nor any of his early biographers said which regiment, if any, he joined in Breda.

  That Descartes left Maurice's army, and the United Provinces, two weeks after Oldenbarnevelt's execution in May 1619 might of course be another coincidence. The fact that he was in the country during the Synod of Dort, and quitted it when matters were definitively over is, however, suggestive. If one accepts the possibility of his employment as an intelligence agent, he could well have been sent as a pair of eyes and ears to observe how matters stood in the Breda garrison of Maurice's army while the Arminian difficulties were going on. He would certainly not have been alone in doing such work in the United Provinces; scores of Jesuit or Habsburg and certainly Spanish or Spanish Netherlandish agents were at work all over the country.

  In any event, when Descartes left the Netherlands he joined another army intent on another, and by then pressing, task of hostilities. This second army was a Catholic one, led by Duke Maximilian of Bavaria on behalf of the Holy Roman Emperor, and Descartes enlisted just as it was en route to Bohemia to avenge the "Defenestration of Prague," the incident which, with Duke Maximilian's victory at the Battle of the White Mountain outside Prague, precipitated the Thirty Years War. And once again it was not as someone in a combatant role such as pikeman, halbadier or cavalryman that Descartes went with Duke Maximilian's troops to that epochal battle, but in some never-specified non-combatant capacity: engineer perhaps—or perhaps still, as a spy.

  Before his decamping to the Czech lands in Maximilian's army, however, the main event in Descartes' intellectual life during his stay in Breda occurred, this being the chance meeting with Isaac Beeckman. Because of the significance of this encounter for Descartes' later career, all biographers rightly dwell on it.

  While walking through Breda on 10 November 1618 (the date is significant as we shall see), Descartes came across a publicly displayed poster describing a mathematical problem and challenging readers to find its solution. Descartes' mathematical facility at school, and his reviving interest in the subject because of the mathematics in his military engineering studies, prompted him to stop and read the poster. As he tried to make out what the problem was (it was written in Flemish), a stranger stopped to read it too. Descartes asked him whether he could translate the Flemish into Latin. The stranger indeed could; and he and Descartes got talking.

  The man was Beeckman, who recorded the event in his diary for 11 November. A "Frenchman from Poitou" had tried a bit of mathematical sophistry on him, Beeckman wrote; but as they found that they had many like-minded interests, and were "the only people in Breda who could speak Latin," they took an instant liking to each other.13 During the remaining six months of Descartes' stay their friendship grew intense. To it is owed the later direction of Descartes' intellectual career, and the basis of his fame.

  3

  A Night of Dreams

  Isaac Beeckman was seven years older than Descartes. He was a qualified physician who had left medicine for teaching, and who later (from 1627) became the rector of the Latin School at Dordrecht, which under his leadership developed into the most prestigious school in the Netherlands. He was also a mathematician and scientist of considerable parts. In cosmology he was a Copernican, and in physics a "corpuscularian"—that is, an atomist in the seventeenth-century sense, as opposed to the classical sense of Democritus and Leucippus.1 Corpuscularianism and atomism share the premise that matter ultimately consists of tiny particles (atomism held that these particles could not themselves be broken down into tinier particles, being at the bottom rung of reality), and that therefore all macroscopic phenomena were to be understood by reference to their microscopic parts and structure. This theory formed the basis of Beeckman's thinking. His early studies in dynamics led him—independently of Galileo—to understand the principle of inertia, and to see that bodies of different weights fall with identical velocities in a vacuum. He agreed with Harvey on the circulation of the blood, and in 1626 he stated the relation between volume and pressure in a given quantity of air, and correlatively understood that water rises in a pump because of air pressure rather than nature's supposed "abhorrence of a vacuum," which was the standard alternative explanation. As this shows, he was perceptive and knowledgeable, and his scientific insights were underpinned by mathematics.

  Happily for Descartes and for history, this intelligent and accomplished man happened to be in Breda in November 1618. He was there visiting a relative and investigating a matrimonial prospect (in his diary he reports in rather business-like terms that he was there to "assist Uncle Peter, and for courtship as well"). In the same diary pages, Beeckman explains the instant mutual attraction that sprang up between the young Frenchman and himself on the tenth day of that month: it was because they found that they shared a "physicomathematical" approach to scientific questions. "[Descartes] says he has never met anyone other than me who pursues enquiry in the way I do, combining Physics and Mathematics in an exact way; and for my part, I have never spoken with anyone other than him who does the same," he wrote.2 The result was a warmly affectionate friendship and a close intellectual co-operation.

  Beeckman was far ahead of Descartes in scientific knowledge at the time they met, but he did not have the same high level of facility in mathematics. This made them a good match; for as Beeckman educated Descartes in science by setting him problems in acoustics, mechanics and hydrostatics, he in turn profited from the younger man's mathematical skills. Beeckman's interests were practical ones, centre
d chiefly in mechanics, and because his fundamental assumption was that macroscopic phenomena are produced by the motions and interactions of corpuscles (considered as agglomerations of atoms), he needed the mathematical input that would make that model more exact in its various applications. This Descartes provided, for several different topics suggested by Beeckman. One topic was harmonics, and Descartes' work here resulted in a little treatise called the Compendium Musicae, giving an arithmetical account of the nature of consonance. It started from enquiries Beeckman had earlier made into harmonics and a theory of sound. Descartes' dedication to Beeckman in this treatise reveals just how much he was the latter's pupil at this stage: "I release the offspring of my mind to the bears, to go to you as a souvenir of our intimacy and as the surest affirmation of my affection for you, on condition that you keep it eternally hidden in the drawers of your desk so it will not affront men's judgement. They would not avert their eyes from its imperfections, as I am sure you will do."

  The second topic was the mathematical description of failing bodies. Here Descartes did not fully understand what Beeckman intended, and his proffered solutions were incorrect. Beeckman put them right, and Descartes doubtlessly learned from the episode.

  The third and most notable topic was hydrostatics (the foundations of fluid dynamics), which Beeckman presented again in problem form, this time in a set of four. And this time Descartes' response contained something significant. In looking for solutions to Beeckman's problems he germinated seeds of ideas and techniques which, much later, flowered into some of his most significant work.3 One commentator wrote that in this early endeavour "certain concepts and modes of argument appear . . . which [came to] constitute the essence of Cartesian micro-mechanism in optics, cosmology, physiology, and natural philosophy generally, after being refined over the next fifteen years through practice, criticism, and deliberate metaphysical reconstruction."4