D. INGENIUM AND THE PRINCIPLES OF INNOVATION AND DISCOVERY

Descartes's Latin letters are not the only relevant source for his use of 'ingenium': there are also the notes of the "Cogitationes privatae." Indeed, ingenium, imagination, and mathematics are discussed in these private cogitations in a way that intimates the connection between them.

One note announces a fictive book, the Thesaurus mathematicus of Polybius the Cosmopolite, which will treat the means of solving all mathematical difficulties and in which "is demonstrated that nothing more can be done with regard to these by human ingenium"; it promises as well to relieve the tormenting labors of those who spend day and night becoming trapped in mathematical Gordian knots "and uselessly consume therein the oil of ingenium". (AT X 214). This ingenium that can become exhausted in mathematical labors is clearly in line with what we have previously seen. Another entry helps deepen the conception of ingenium, which we already know to be qualifiable in various ways.

For all ingenia determinate limits are prescribed that they cannot transcend. If some cannot use principles for discovery because of a defect of ingenium, they can nevertheless know the true reward of the sciences, which suffices them for carrying out true judgments in the estimation^[25] of things. (AT X 215)

[24] Norman Kemp Smith suggested translating 'ingenium' as 'total mind-body equipment', which captures the essence of the matter. See Kemp Smith, New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes: Descartes as Pioneer (London: Macmillan, 1952), 15 l, 160.

[25] The term 'aestimatione' may implicitly refer to the internal sense vis aestimativa.

The first sentence asserts that ingenium is inevitably finite and limited. The second makes clear that it is not only limits due to the nature of inge-nium that Descartes has in mind but also those that have to do with the particular constitution of the individual's ingenium. The point, however, is that although defects of ingenium might make it impossible for someone to make discoveries directly from first principles, it does not affect the ability to make true judgments; apparently ingenium is the name for that power human beings have to assess and deal truly with whatever they meet in the course of their lives, regardless of their ability to reason from first principles.

The next note concerning ingenium, quoted already in chapter 2, is surprisingly clear about how far beyond the cognitive it goes.

There are certain parts in all ingenia that, when even lightly touched, excite strong affects: thus a boy with a strong spirit [forti animo], having been scolded, will not cry but get angry; another will cry. If it is said that many and great calamities have happened, we will be saddened; if it is added that some evil person was the cause, we will get angry. The passage from passion to passion [occurs] through neighboring ones; often, however, the passage from contraries is more robust, as when at a joyful party there is suddenly announced a sad event. (AT X 217)

Here ingenium has to do with the sensitive part of the soul in the amplest sense of the term: any part of the human being that is involved in a sensitive response is included. The full range of human affectivity, whether it is emotional, externally sensory, internally sensory, or rational, is embraced by ingenium. It might therefore be rightly conceived according to this note as the soul insofar as it is more than vegetative, that is, involved in more than the physical processes of constructing, maintaining, and reproducing the body. What Descartes is discussing in this note was of course treated many years later as passions of the soul. The affective, the sensitive, and the cognitive powers of ingenium are thus inborn and part of the nature of the individual.

What is at issue here is the individual native human endowment that makes the human being this person rather than that, yet still makes him or her a fully human being. One can have a limited or defective ingenium; one can be ingenious or industrious or slothful; one can be capable of both discovery and judgment, or just of judgment.

It is precisely because the fundamental powers of ingenium are common to all that it is capable of regulation. This aspect becomes clear by juxtaposing two other notes from the private cogitations:

As a youth, whenever ingenious discoveries were presented, I asked myself whether I could discover [them] for myself, even without having read the author: from which I gradually noticed that I was using fixed rules [certis regulis]. (AT X 214)

and

The sayings of the wise can be brought back [reduci] to a certain very few general rules. (AT X 217)

Inventions that were ingenious (ingeniosis inventis ), that showed the use of an energetic ingenium and were reinvented by the young Descartes simply from hearing of them without any explanatory gloss, led him little by little to recognize that this use of the ingenium proceeds according to certain rules; and he even gained the insight that the sayings of the wise, of those who know how to join science and virtue,^[26] can be led back to rules. What we have here, then, is an adumbration around 1620 of the field toward which the Regulae was directed: the proper use of the ingenium according to certain simple rules that are themselves inherent in ingenium. That is, the native human endowment by its very nature is capable of directing itself well if it recognizes the essential characteristics of its nature. Thus ingenium is also closely related to another theme found in both the "Cogitationes privatae" and the Regulae, that even without a conscious knowledge there exists within the soul a small number of principles, rules, sparks, seeds—as they are variously called—that are sufficient for discovery and judgment about all things.

It is almost just a corollary, then, that any theory of method, whether a method of invention for those blessed with a superb ingenium or simply a method of judging aright for those who have no more than the powers of ingenium common to all, would find its leading principle in the ingenium itself; and that such a theory would have not just a cognitive purpose, and certainly not just the goal of pure intellection, but also a practical purpose: the guidance of judgment in all things that are susceptible of judgment, including those things that the sensitive, responsive human spirit encounters in everyday living.