Descartes' Travels in Europe

When Descartes arrived in Amsterdam, the republic was still busy distributing the riches that the fleets of the two East and West India companies had recently taken from the Spanish and Portuguese, which spread this prodigious abundance throughout Holland, making it so prosperous.

Prince D’Orange Frederick Henry was beginning the siege of Bosleduc, the most remarkable of this century.

The Spanish considered Bosleduc impregnable.

It changed hands through a capitulation signed on the following September 14th.

Descartes then wanted to rest.

In the midst of the conveniences he found for his purposes, he always regarded himself as a stranger who did not aspire to the rights of a citizen, and he only settled down with the intention of changing residence often.

The space of more than twenty years he spent in Holland, which he called his hermitage, had almost nothing more stable than the stay of the Israelites in the Arabian desert.

The diversity of his locations is something so obscure and confusing for understanding his life that I believed I would oblige the reader by gathering them for him as on a map, the different places of these stays according to the order he took on his journey.

From Amsterdam, he went to live in Friesland near the city of Franeker in 1629.

He returned the same year to Amsterdam, where he spent the winter of the following year.

If he carried out his plan for a trip to England, it was only in 1631; and he came back to finish this year in Amsterdam, instead of making the trip to Constantinople for which he had been solicited.

It is not known exactly where he spent the year 1632.

But in 1633 he went to live in Deventer in the province of Overijssel.

From there, he returned to Amsterdam, where he spent part of 1634, during which he made a few short trips to The Hague and Leiden.

He then made a trip to Denmark with Mr. De Ville-Bressieux, and he returned to Amsterdam, from where he made a retreat of a few months to Dordrecht, after which he went to Amsterdam, and from there he went a second time to Deventer in 1635.

He then returned to West Friesland, and stayed for some time in Leeuwarden, which is the main city of the province.

He spent the winter there, and then he returned to Amsterdam, where he stayed for a few months, at the end of which he went to Leiden, no doubt to attend to the publication of his works.

He then went to live near the city of Utrecht.

From there, he went for the first time to live in Egmond De Binnen or De Abdij, the most beautiful village in North Holland in the city of Alkmaar, as well as 2 other villages named Egmond, in one of which he also stayed for a while.

He then returned to Utrecht for a short time. In 1639, he went to live in Harderwijk, a city in the Veluwe on the shores of the Zuiderzee.

From there, he passed into a country house near Utrecht.

He then retired to Leiden at the beginning of 1640.

6 months later, he was in Amersfoort, a city in the seigniory of Utrecht.

In 1641, he stayed a few months in Leiden then went to the village of Oegstgeest or Eyndegeest, half a league from Leiden.

He lived there until the end of the winter 1643.

Then he went to Egmond De Hoef, which is also near Alkmaar. He rented a house there from May 1 until May 1, 1644.

He then returned to Leiden. From there he made his first trip to France, from June until November.

Having returned to Holland, he settled so well in Egmond De Binnen that he no longer left to go and live elsewhere, but only to make his trips with the intention of always returning to this place.

So, to favorably explain the thought of those who believed that he had lived sometimes in Alkmaar and sometimes in Haarlem, it must be said that these were places of correspondence for him where his news was received and where his packages and letters were addressed during his stay in Egmond.

He stayed for some time in a country house near Haarlem.

From Egmond, he sometimes went to The Hague, but only to walk and to see Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, as he had often done from Oegstgeest in the preceding years. From there, he also went to Amsterdam to see Mr. Chanut. If he also made some trips to Leiden, Utrecht, and Groningen in Friesland, during his stay in Egmond, it was to handle affairs he had against ministers and theologians of the country.

In 1647, he made his second trip to France through The Hague, Rotterdam, and Middelburg, which were less places of residence than of passage for this trip.

It lasted from the month of June until the beginning of winter, when he returned to Egmond with the Abbé Picot who had accompanied him to Touraine, Poitou, and Brittany.

After his third trip to France, which he made the following year and from which he returned at the end of August, he no longer left Egmond except to go to Sweden, from where God did not allow him to return.

Although he boasted of being able to maintain solitude in the midst of a crowd of people as easily as in the depths of the deserts, he nevertheless avoided the heart of large cities and made a point of lodging at the end of their suburbs. He always preferred villages and detached houses in the middle of the countryside, as much as he could find them convenient for his use, provided they were in the vicinity of cities to obtain his sustenance with more ease.

He never or rarely had the letters and packages sent to him addressed directly to his place of residence, in order to live more hidden.

It was sometimes to Dordrecht through Mr. Beeckman; to Haarlem through Mr. Bloemaert; to Amsterdam through Ms. Reyniers or Mr. Van-Sureck; and sometimes to Leiden through Mr. Hooghland. Usually, only Father Mersenne in France had his secret on this matter, and he kept it so religiously that several men of letters and curious people from France who traveled throughout Holland during this time were deprived of the satisfaction of seeing him because they could not unearth him.

On his side, when he wrote to his friends, especially before he had settled in Egmond, he usually dated his letters not from the place where he lived, but from some city like Amsterdam, Leiden, etc., where he was sure he would not be found. When he began to be too well known in a place and saw himself visited too frequently by people who were useless to him, he did not delay in moving to break these habits and retreat to another place where he was not known. This succeeded for him until his reputation served to discover him wherever it followed him like his shadow.

This is the clarification that I believed was necessary for the various locations of Mr. Descartes’s stay in Holland, being convinced that their arrangement will contribute a lot to clearing up the rest of his life in the minds of readers.

To resume his story upon his arrival from France in Amsterdam, where we had interrupted it, we will note that after a deliberation of a few days he went to Friesland to be even further away from the great world.

He retired near Franeker, a city where there were some scholars because of the university that had been established there since the year 1581.

He stayed in a small castle that was separated from the city only by a moat. He judged the place all the more convenient for him because mass was said there in complete safety, and he was left with complete freedom for the other exercises of his religion.

It was there that, having renewed his old promises before the altars to work only for the glory of God and the utility of the human race, he wanted to begin his studies with his meditations on the existence of God and the immortality of our soul. But so as not to undertake anything that falls under the jurisdiction of theology, he did not want to consider God in all his work except as the author of nature to whom he intended to consecrate all his talents. It was not natural theology, but only that of revelation, that he excluded from his designs.

It is good to hear him explain himself to Father Mersenne on this subject.

Descartes

Theology is beyond the capacity of my mind. But it is not outside of my profession because it does not touch what depends on revelation, which I properly call theology. Rather, it is metaphysics. It must be examined by human reason. All those to whom God has given the use of this reason should use it to know him and to know themselves. It is with this that I have tried to begin my studies. And I will tell you that I would never have been able to find the foundations of physics if I had not sought them in this way. But it is the subject that I have studied the most of all, and in which, thank God, I have found enough satisfaction.

At least I think I have found how one can demonstrate metaphysical truths in a way that is more evident than the demonstrations of geometry.

I say this according to my judgment, for I do not know if I could persuade others of it.

The first 9 months that I was in this country I worked on nothing else, and I believe you had already heard me say before that I had planned to put something in writing about it, but I do not judge it appropriate to do so until I have first seen how physics will be received.

If, however, the book you are talking about was something very well done, the subjects it deals with are so dangerous that I would perhaps feel obliged to reply to it on the spot if it fell into my hands. But I will not fail to touch on several metaphysical questions in my physics, and particularly this one: that the mathematical truths you call eternal were established by God and depend entirely on him, just like all the rest of the creatures.

It is indeed to speak of God as a Jupiter or a Saturn, and to subject him to the Styx and to destiny, to say that these truths are independent of him.

Do not fear, I beg you, to assert and publish everywhere that it is God who has established these laws in nature, just as a king establishes laws in his kingdom.

There is none in particular that we cannot understand if our mind carries itself to consider it; and they are all engraved in our soul and, as it were, born with us, just as a king would print his laws in the heart of all his subjects if he also had the power.

On the contrary, we cannot understand the greatness of God even though we know it. But what makes us judge it incomprehensible is precisely what makes us esteem it more; just as a king has more majesty when he is less familiarly known to his subjects, provided, however, that they do not imagine themselves to be without a king and that they know him enough not to doubt it. You will be told that if God had established these truths, he could change them as a king does his laws.

To which it must be replied that yes, if his will can change. But I understand them as eternal and immutable, and I judge the same thing about God.

But his will is free. Yes, but his power is incomprehensible.

And generally, we can well assert that God can do everything that we can understand; but not that he cannot do what we cannot understand. For it would be reckless to think that our imagination has as much extent as his power.

From this essay, Descartes intended to connect his philosophy and natural theology.

The other theology is based on divine inspiration.

The space of nine months that he testifies to having

He had given 9 months to his meditations on the existence of God and of our souls.

This shows us that he wanted to continue this study after having left his residence in Franeker where he did not stay for more than 6 months.

He continued it during the first months of his return to Amsterdam the following winter. But the treatise he had begun was interrupted by other studies, and he did not resume it until ten years later.

What prevented him from abandoning this work altogether was an extract that Father Mersenne sent him the following year from that dangerous writing we talked about, not believing that he was allowed not to oppose the pernicious maxims it contained concerning divinity.

Descartes

I owe you too much for sending me an extract from this manuscript. The shortest way I know to respond to the reasons it brings against divinity, and at the same time to all those of other atheists, is to find an evident demonstration that makes everyone believe that God is. For me, I would dare to boast of having found one that satisfies me entirely and that makes me know more certainly that God is than I know the truth of any proposition of geometry.

The universal consent of all peoples is sufficient to maintain divinity against the insults of atheists; and an individual should never enter into a dispute against them unless he is very sure of convincing them.

I will test in optics if I am capable of explaining my conceptions and of persuading others of a truth after I have persuaded myself, which I do not think at all. But if I found by experience that this was the case, I could one day finish a small treatise on metaphysics that I began while in Friesland, the main points of which are to prove the existence of God and that of our souls when they are separated from the body, from which their immortality follows. For I get angry when I think that there are people in the world so audacious and so impudent as to fight against God."