B. THE MEANING OF 'INGENIUM'

In his commentary on the Discourse on the Method, Etienne Gilson distinguishes three senses of 'esprit' (having noted that the Latin equivalent is 'ingenium'): first, thought as substantial and personal—and, taken in its most general acceptation, as opposed to extension; second, memory and imagination, as distinct from reason in its proper sense (here Gilson refers to Rule 12); third, spirit as distinct from 'soul' (the latter term tends to include vegetative and motive powers and therefore might encourage the confusion of body and soul),^[11] But, as the definition of Rule 12 already suggests and as I hope will become clear from the remainder of this chapter, ingenium as used by Descartes in the period before 1630, though most closely resembling the second of the senses identified by Gilson, not only encompasses aspects of the others but also goes beyond them. Descartes's notion of 'ingenium' clearly takes on the personal and substantial aspect

[10] Cf. AT X 387 1. 12 with 388 1. 3. Giovanni Crapulli believes on the basis of the 1684 Dutch version N (which has "beweeging van denking" throughout) that "motion of imaginatio " should be emended to "motion of cogitatio. " See René Descartes, Regulae ad directionem ingenii, ed. Giovanni Crapulli, International Archives of the History of Ideas, no. 12 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 22. A, H, and AT all have imaginatio, however.

[11] René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, 5th ed., ed. Etienne Gilson (Paris: J. Vrin, 1976), 86.

indicated in Gilson's first sense of 'esprit', and if it does not really include the vegetative, it certainly includes the motive powers by virtue of phantasia's central control of the nerve and motor systems. This personal substantiality is understood as corporeal (and thus extended) as well as intellectual and spiritual: ingenium emphasizes the human person's endowment as a particular, corporeal-spiritual being, who because of those particularities has a somewhat greater or lesser aptitude for realizing the potentialities, especially cognitive ones, that are common to all human beings qua human. The notion therefore does not presume the radical dichotomy of thought and corporeality to be found in the later Descartes. Moreover, Descartes's ingenium is a cognitive power that is able to recognize the forms and relations of images and to manipulate them accordingly, so that it exercises functions of the Avicennan vis cogitativa and the Thomist particular reason.

In classical Latin, 'ingenium', a commonly used word derived from in -and gignere (to bear, produce, beget) and thus suggesting something inborn or innate, indicated in its most basic sense the sum of inborn faculties or powers. Of human beings it indicated the original power of inborn disposition, with also the more specific sense of a strong and firm soul. With regard to the intellect, it could be used generally of the powers of the mind and extended metonymically to the whole human being; used particularly, it could be synonymous with prudence, ingenuity, and the like, indicate single faculties of mind, or refer specifically to the faculties of invention or phantasia. It could be used of deficient or bad parts or characteristics of mind or soul; and, finally, it could occasionally be used of beasts and other natural things in the sense of their nature or faculties.^[12]

'Ingenium' is not uncommon in medieval Scholastics. For the most part it is not singled out for technical or specialized use (unlike 'ratio' or 'phantasia') but continues to convey the chief meanings of classical Latin usage. In Thomas Aquinas, for example, it can indicate ingenuity or cleverness, but also the sum of human powers or human intellectual powers; and in some formulations it suggests the properly human powers of knowing that therefore fall short of reaching the things of revelation.^[13]

The term does have a more systematic use in the works of Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141), including the Didascalicon and his writings on meditation. In these works ingenium is paired with memoria as the two natural powers (naturae ; they are contrasted by Hugh to practice and discipline) that are necessary to prolonged study or meditation. Memoria enables human beings to retain what they have experienced and read, whereas inge-

[12] S.v. 'ingenium', Thesaurus linguae latinae, 25 vols. (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1900-), vol. 7, pt. l, 1522-1535.

[13] See Petrus De Bergomo, ed., In opera Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Index seu Tabula Aurea (Paris: 1880; phototype ed. Alba-Rome: Editiones Paulinae, n.d.), 505.

nium is the natural aptitude for grasping or conceiving those things properly in the first place.^[14]

The word had a programmatic importance for Italian Renaissance humanists, as the human power of understanding and invention that in its flexibility and adaptability underlies the effective use of words and that contrasts with a reason (ratio) that deals with the eternal and thus transcends ail things specifically human.^[15] In the late sixteenth-century commentary on Aristotle's dialectics by the Jesuit cardinal Francisco de Toledo, a work that was certainly available to Descartes at the Collège Henri IV at La Flèche, 'ingenium' is used to indicate the highest rational powers of recognition (the fundamental modes of the syllogism, he says, depend on principles revealed by natural light from which the human ingenium is unable to dissent). The word is also not infrequent in the commentaries on Aristotle produced at the Jesuit University of Coimbra toward the end of the sixteenth century, and it even takes on a quasi-technical meaning in the one devoted to On Generation and Corruption. There 'ingenium' is equivalent to the embodied human spirit, the individual human being as a particularized corporeal manifestation of the species. Thus the term is broad enough to cover the peculiarities induced by individualization as well as the general nature and powers due to the species.^[16]

Ingeniurn takes up slightly more than a full two-column page in Rudolphus Goclenius's early seventeenth-century Lexicon philosophicum, which concisely summarizes the variety of learned acceptations of Latin and Greek philosophical terms.^[17] Goclenius starts with the key general and specific

[14] See book 3 of Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), esp. chaps. 7 and 8. The Didascalicon is perhaps the premier medieval treatise on the nature of science and method. Ingenium is prominent also in Hugh's "De modo dicendi et meditandi," in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae Cursus Completus, 2d ser. (Paris, 1854; known as Patrologiae Latinae ), 176: 875-880, esp. 877. The relationship of Hugh's work to Descartes and possible influences of this constellation of topics on Descartes's thinking deserve further investigation.

[15] See Ernesto Grassi, Heidegger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism: Four Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 24 (Binghamton, N.Y: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1983), 20, 73-76; and Hanna-Barbara Gerl, Einführung in die Philosophic der Renaissance (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 154—163. Ingenium was fundamental to the invention of concetti or conceits in baroque aesthetics; see Joseph A. Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York: Columbia University Press/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), 29-43, and M. Fumaroli, ed., Critique et créa tion littéraires en France au xvii' siècle, Colloque International du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, no. 557, Paris, 4-6June 1974 (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1977).

[16] See Franciscus Toletus, Introductio in dialecticam Aristotelis (Venice, 1588), 163; Coimbran College of the Society of Jesus, In duos libros de Generatione et Corruptione Aristotelis, 2d ed. (Lyon, 1606), 485-489.

[17] S.v. 'ingenium' in Rudolphus Goclenius, Lexicon philosophicum quo tanquarn clave philosophiae fores aperiuntur (Frankfurt: M. Becker, 1613; photographic reprint Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964), 241-242.

uses: the most general is for the "inborn power and nature of any thing whatever"; the specific proper meaning indicates "the power of successfully and easily discovering and contriving in human beings, and the power of memory"; and the specific improper refers in analogical use to animals and in metonymic use to arts discovered through ingenium. His discussion makes several points important for our purposes. He remarks that

ingenium spoken most properly is the constitution of the rational faculty of the rational soul for understanding something or discovering or teaching. Or ingenium is the natural aptitude or faculty by which we teach, and through [which] we ourselves think, or discover something. The genus of ingenium is euphuia,^[18] more broadly indeed the latter is open to the former, since (generally it is the native goodness of soul or body) specifically it is the good constitution by nature of the rational soul now with respect to the true, now with respect to the good, nor is euphuia only of ingenium but also of natural judgment. Scheckius, Topic. at 39, agrees: "This in fact is euphuia, to be able to rightly elect the true and flee the false." But for Aristotle the part of ingenium is the natural facility for judging something.

Goclenius remarks further that a function of ingenium is eumatheia, "the right constitution for learning disciplines" and the habit of swiftly discovering middle terms, and he distinguishes it from sunesis, which is nevertheless affine to ingenium. After noting political, pneumatic (spiritual), and theological senses of an ingenium apart from judgment, he points out that Scaliger differs from those who subordinate judgment to ingenium and quotes the Jesuit Peter Molina, who said that "philosophy is the file of judgment, and the whetstone of ingenium," to show that memory is not necessary for good judgment. He concludes,

The variety of ingenium depends sometimes on the temperament of the body, sometimes on the various disposition of the mind, and the constitution of the organs, and of the auxiliary faculties, as of the phantasia (imaginatricis).
The distinctions of ingenium are various. For the ingenium is subtle, or thick, acute or obtuse. Perspicacious or less perspicacious, quick or slow, sharp or less sharp (because of which also sharpness [acrimonia] is attributed to judgment).

Thus ingenium has chiefly to do with the natural powers of things and, in human beings, with the natural powers associated with the rationality that differentiates them from animals, but that also includes the corporeal basis attendant on their being rational animals. It is associated with quickness of judgment and learning and the right constitution for learning in a

[18] This term and also the eumatheia and sunesis that Goclenius subsequently mentions appear in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Euphuia is 'natural gift', 'good natural parts', or 'cleverness' (e.g., at 1114b3-10); eumatheia is 'readiness in learning'; sunesis 'intelligence in practical judging'.

disciplined or scientific way; it is closely dependent on the disposition of the physical organs that aid the mind, especially the imagination.

The advantage of referring to Goclenius is that he reflects learned usage contemporary with Descartes's youth. 'Ingenium' was not just a word for philosophers' and theologians' treatises, however. We must recall that Latin was the language of instruction and communication at La Flèche, both inside and outside the classroom, and so Descartes would surely have picked up any colloquial meanings that the word had. It is interesting to note, then, that in assessing the performance of their pupils, the Jesuits used 'ingenium' as one of their categories, more or less synonymous with what we would today call "natural ability," "talent," or "aptitude." Thus René the schoolboy would have heard himself and his mates evaluated with respect to their ingenia in the following terms: mediocre, sufficiently acute, optimum, dull, very sharp, deficient in ingenium, does not lack ingenium, of moderate ingenium, somewhat acute, most perspicacious, lit-de apt for logic, of at most mediocre ingenium, minimally sharp, obtuse, not well constituted by ingenium, ingenious boy, has a good memory, less prompt ingenium, of sharpest ingenium and outstanding in memory, various and mutable ingenium, acute and subtle, stupid.^[19] The ingenium the instructors were assessing was an individuated capacity for learning, particular to each student.^[20] in which the premium was placed on quickness, penetration, and good memory.