Chandoux

A few days after Descartes arrived in Paris, an assembly of learned people was held at the Pope’s nuncio, who wanted to get important listeners for Mr. de Chandoux, who was to give a talk on new philosophical ideas.

Chandoux was a man of spirit, who practiced medicine and worked particularly with chemistry. He was one of those free geniuses who appeared in quite large numbers during the time of Cardinal Richelieu, and who undertook to shake off the yoke of scholasticism.

He had no less a dislike for the philosophy of Aristotle or the Peripatetics than Bacon, Mersenne, Gassendi, or Hobbes. The others might have had more capacity, more strength, and a wider range of mind, but he had no less courage and resolution than they to forge a new path and do without a guide in the search for the principles of a new philosophy.

He had won over the minds of several people of consideration in his favor, and the talent he had for expressing himself with a lot of boldness and a lot of grace had procured him a very great access to the great, whom he was accustomed to dazzling with the pompous appearance of his reasoning.

For a long time, he had been entertaining the curious with the hope of a new philosophy, whose principles he boasted of as if they had been laid on unshakable foundations, and he had promised the plan to Mr. the nuncio in particular. One of the authors to whom we are indebted for this detail believed too lightly that this nuncio was Cardinal Barberini, who had left France more than three years earlier and had never exercised a nunciature there, but only a legation of five or six months.

This nuncio was Mr. de Bagni who later became a cardinal, and who was the older brother of the one Mr. Descartes had had the honor of knowing on his trip to Italy when he passed through the Valtellina, where, still a layman, he commanded the troops of the Holy See under the name of the Marquis de Bagni.

To give more honor to Mr. de Chandoux, he had not only invited a large number of scholars and fine minds, but also several qualified people, among whom was noted Mr. Cardinal de Bérulle. Mr. Descartes, whose return from La Rochelle he had learned of, was invited to attend, and he brought with him Father Mersenne and Mr. de Ville-Bressieux, who practiced chemistry as well as mechanics. Mr. de Chandoux spoke in the assembly like a perfectly well-prepared man.

He gave a long speech to refute the usual way of teaching philosophy in the school. He even proposed a fairly coherent system of philosophy that he intended to establish and that he wanted to pass off as new.

The pleasantness with which he accompanied his speech so impressed the company that he received almost universal applause. There was only Mr. Descartes who made a point of not showing outwardly the signs of a satisfaction that he had not actually received from the speech of Mr. de Chandoux. Cardinal de Bérulle, who was particularly observing him, noticed his silence. This is what obliged him to ask him for his opinion on a speech that had seemed so beautiful to the company.

Descartes did what he could to excuse himself from it, saying that he had nothing to say after the approvals of so many learned men whom he esteemed more capable than him of judging the speech that had just been heard.

This evasion, accompanied by an accent that marked something suspicious, made the cardinal conjecture that he did not judge it entirely like the others.

This excited him even more to make him declare what he thought. Mr. the nuncio and the other most remarkable people of the assembly joined their requests to those of the cardinal to press him to speak. So that Mr. Descartes, no longer able to back down without incivility, told the company that he had certainly not yet heard anyone who could boast of speaking better than Mr. de Chandoux had just done. He first praised the eloquence of his speech and the beautiful talents he had for speech.

He even approved of this generous freedom that Mr. de Chandoux had shown, to try to pull philosophy from the vexation of the scholastics and the Peripatetics, who seemed to want to reign over all those of the other sects. But he took the opportunity of this speech to point out the force of verisimilitude which occupies the place of truth, and which in this encounter seemed to have triumphed over the judgment of so many serious and judicious people. He added that when one has to deal with people easy enough to be content with the verisimilar, as the illustrious company before which he had the honor of speaking had just done, it was not difficult to pass off the false for the true, and to reciprocally pass off the true for the false with the help of the apparent. To test it on the spot, he asked the assembly that someone from the company would take the trouble to propose to him any truth that he pleased, and which was one of those that appear to be the most incontestable. It was done, and with twelve arguments all more verisimilar than the other, he succeeded in proving to the company that it was false.

He then had a falsehood proposed to him of those that one is accustomed to taking for the most obvious, and by means of a dozen other verisimilar arguments he led his listeners to recognize it as a plausible truth. The assembly was surprised by the force and breadth of genius that Mr. Descartes showed in his reasoning; but it was even more astonished to see itself so clearly convinced of the ease with which our mind becomes the dupe of verisimilitude. He was then asked if he did not know of some infallible means to avoid sophisms. He replied that he did not know of any more infallible than the one he was accustomed to using, adding that he had drawn it from the depths of mathematics, and that he did not believe that there was any truth that he could not demonstrate clearly with this means according to his own principles. This means was none other than his universal rule, which he otherwise called his natural method, on which he put to the test all kinds of propositions of whatever nature and whatever species they might be. The first fruit of this method was to show first if the proposition was possible or not, because it examined and assured it (to use his terms) with a knowledge and a certainty equal to that which the rules of arithmetic can produce.

The other fruit consisted in making him infallibly solve the difficulty of the same proposition.

He never had a more brilliant opportunity than the one that presented itself in this assembly to make this infallible means he had found to avoid sophisms valid. This is what he himself recognized a few years later in a letter he wrote from Amsterdam to Mr. de Ville-Bressieux to whom he made him remember what had happened in this encounter. “You have seen,” he says, “these two fruits of my beautiful rule or natural method on the subject of what I was obliged to do in the conversation I had with the Pope’s nuncio, Cardinal de Bérulle, Father Mersenne, and all this great and learned company that had assembled at the said nuncio’s house to hear the speech of Monsieur de Chandoux concerning his new philosophy. It was there that I made the whole troop confess what the art of good reasoning can do on the mind of those who are moderately learned, and how my principles are better established, more true, and more natural than any of the others that are already received among people of study. You remained convinced as all those who took the trouble to implore me to write them and to teach them to the public.”

Those who do not want to judge Mr. Descartes on the rule that must serve us to distinguish the philosopher from the charlatan, and who will not know what Mr. de Ville-Bressieux was to him, to whom he had the right to speak as a master to a disciple, will perhaps take the good opinion that he testified to have of his rule and his principles for a trait of vanity, and will be led to believe that he wanted to prevent or stop the presumption of Mr. de Chandoux by another presumption. But it will be enough to have once passed on to Mr. Descartes the first resolution he had taken at first not to attach himself to following anyone, and to seek something better than what had been found until then, to have more favorable thoughts of him. His was not to pass off Mr. de Chandoux as a charlatan in front of the assembly.

He did not find it bad that he professed to abandon the philosophy that is commonly taught in schools, because he was persuaded of the reasons he had not to follow it: but he would have wished that he had been in a state to be able to substitute another one for it that was better and of greater use. He agreed that what Mr. de Chandoux had put forward was much more verisimilar than what is put forward according to the scholastic method, but that in his opinion what he had proposed was no better at bottom. He claimed that it was coming back to the same goal by another path, and that his new philosophy was almost the same thing as that of the school, disguised in other terms. According to him, it had the same disadvantages, and it sinned like it in the principles, in that they were obscure, and that they could not serve to clarify any difficulty. He did not content himself with making these general observations: but for the satisfaction of the company, he went down into the detail of some of its faults which he made very sensible, always having the honesty not to attribute the fault to Mr. de Chandoux, to whose industry he always took care to bear witness. He then added that he did not believe that it was impossible to establish in philosophy clearer and more certain principles, by which it would be easier to give a reason for all the effects of nature.

There was no one in the company who did not seem touched by his reasoning: and some of those who had declared themselves against the method of the schools to follow Mr. de Chandoux did not hesitate to change their opinion, and to suspend their mind to determine it as they did later to the philosophy that Mr. Descartes was to establish on the principles of which he had just spoken to them. Cardinal de Bérulle above all the others wonderfully liked all that he had heard of it, and asked Mr. Descartes that he could hear him again on the same subject in private. Mr. Descartes, sensitive to the honor he received from such a flattering proposal, paid him a visit a few days later, and spoke to him of the first thoughts that had come to him on philosophy, after he had noticed the uselessness of the means that are commonly used to treat it.

He gave him a glimpse of the consequences that these thoughts could have if they were well conducted, and the usefulness that the public would derive from them if his way of philosophizing were applied to medicine and mechanics, one of which would produce the restoration and preservation of health, the other the decrease and relief of the labors of men. The cardinal had no trouble understanding the importance of the plan; and judging him very suitable to execute it, he used the authority he had over his mind to lead him to undertake this great work. He even made it an obligation of conscience for him, on the grounds that having received from God a force and a penetration of mind with lights on this that he had not granted to others, he would render an exact account of the use of his talents, and would be responsible before this sovereign judge of men for the wrong he would do to the human race by depriving it of the fruit of his meditations. He even went so far as to assure him that with intentions as pure and a capacity of mind as vast as the one he knew him to have, God would not fail to bless his work and to fill him with all the success he could expect from it.

The impression that the exhortations of this pious cardinal made on him, being joined to what his nature and his reason had been dictating to him for a long time, finished convincing him. Until then he had not yet embraced any party in philosophy, and had not taken any sect, as we learn from himself. He confirmed himself in the resolution of keeping his freedom, and of working on nature itself without stopping to see in what he would approach or move away from those who had treated philosophy before him. The instances that his friends redoubled to press him to communicate his lights to the public, did not allow him to back down any further. He no longer deliberated than on the means of executing his plan more conveniently; and having noted two main obstacles that could prevent him from succeeding, namely the heat of the climate and the crowd of the great world, he resolved to withdraw forever from the place of his habits, and to procure for himself a perfect solitude in a moderately cold country, where he would not be known.