SEVEN
Imagination and the Activity of Thought

The proof for the existence of God in the Meditations crucially depends on the human capacity for a positive idea of infinity (AT VII 45-47, 137-138, 368-369). This positive idea could scarcely be embodied in imagination, which cannot distinctly conceive many-sided figures more complicated than triangles, rectangles, and pentagons, much less infinity. Understanding, in contrast, can quite as easily conceive a thousand-sided figure as a triangle. The extra effort of mind needed to imagine something in addition to understanding it Descartes cites as clear evidence of the difference between imaginatio and intellectio pura (AT VII 72-73). To use locutions borrowed from the Regulae, the pure and attentive mind has in general an easy and simple grasp of the intellectual things, not of the imagined ones.

A. IMAGINATION, INFINITY, AND ETERNAL TRUTHS

Already in the 15 April 1630 letter to Mersenne, in which the topic of eternal truths was raised, Descartes had said that the infinite God could not be imagined. "It would be rash to think that our imagination reaches as far as his power." He remarks that his wish was for "people to get used to speaking of God in a manner worthier, I think, than the common and almost universal way of imagining him as a finite being." In the concluding paragraph of the letter, after responding to queries Mersenne had made about mathematical infinity, Descartes points out that finite reasoning cannot guide us in thinking about the infinite (AT I 145-146).

From this time onward, whenever Descartes writes about imagination he almost invariably portrays it as a cognitively limited power.^[1] This contrasts

[1] Discursive reasoning also is limited in contrast with pure seeing according to the light of reason. See, for example, the replies to Hobbes, AT VII 190-191.

with his usage as late as 20 November 1629. In a letter to Mersenne he said that the capacity of the imagination to embrace all thoughts that enter the human spirit—in Latin Descartes would have written ingenium — is unlimited. Reacting negatively to a proposal by a certain Monsieur Hardy for a universal language, Descartes suggested constructing the primitive words and letters of such a language "by means of order, that is, establishing an order among all the thoughts that can enter into the human spirit, the same as there is one naturally established among numbers"; just as one can quickly learn how in an unknown language "to name all the numbers up to infinity, which are in any case an infinity of different words," one might do the same with "all the other words necessary for expressing all the other things that fall in the spirit of human beings." But he doubted that M. Hardy was thinking of this, because it

depends on the true Philosophy; since it is otherwise impossible to enumerate all the thoughts of men, and to put them in order, nor even to distinguish them in a way so that they are clear and simple, which is in my opinion the greatest secret one can have for acquiring the good science. And if someone had well explained what are the simple ideas that are in the imagination of men, out of which everything they think is composed, and if it had been received by everyone, I would consequently dare to hope for a universal language very easy to learn, pronounce, and write, and what is the chief thing, which would aid judgment, representing to it as distinctly as possible all things, so that it would be almost impossible to be deceived. (AT I 80-81)

The imagination as presented here is at the very least able to face up to the task of enumerating infinity and in some way able to conceive it by means of the well-ordered process of representing things. The strictly mathematical uses of imagination in the earliest mathematical writings had allowed imagination to grasp infinity as the terminus of a well-ordered process of geometric and algebraic constructions.^[2] Of course, even then Descartes might have agreed that the human ingenium is not well adapted for distinctly imagining a thousand-sided figure; yet the ingenium had ex-

[2] See Sepper, "Descartes and the Eclipse of Imagination," 383-384. In the physical and mathematical writings from the 1620s Descartes often uses the imagination words when a mathematical construct is applied to a physical situation (e.g., lines of pressure imagined in a vessel of water, AT X 70), a physical or geometrical entity is conceived as undergoing a dynamic transformation (e.g., the generation of a conic section through the rotation and motion of lines, AT X 232-233), or a process of indefinite addition or division is undertaken with a geometrical figure (e.g., drawing indefinitely many lines parallel to a given line, AT X 75). Often enough the imagination is in effect conceiving a limit to the unending reiteration of a procedure or reapplication of a concept (e.g., the indefinite parallels just mentioned, AT X 75, and the unending division of space or time, AT X 73, 75). And although the early "Excerpta mathematica" do not use the imagination words, they nevertheless show how indefinitely expanding algebraic series of sums and differences, which are displayed in tabular form, can be used to express the length of the side of any regular polygon inscribed in a cricle with unit radius (i.e., by extending the number of terms indefinitely one can determine the length of the side of an inscribed regular n -gon for arbitrarily large choices of n ; see AT X 285-297). This early physical and mathematical work must have convinced Descartes that the imagination could quite easily handle a well-ordered infinity.

pedients for breaking down, sequencing, and surveying problems, so that they could be scanned, surveyed, and finally resolved. In Rule 7 he ad-vetted to how we can know that the area of a circle is greater than that of any other plane figure with the same perimeter. All that was required was to show it held true for some particular figures. Induction allows the conclusion to be extended to all others (AT X 390). The fact that he did not give details of the proof is not important. What counts is that he believed that his method of imagination allowed one to encompass in principle an infinity of possibilities without needing to examine each one. As Rule 8 remarks, "nothing can be so multiple or dispersed that by the enumeration we are doing here it cannot be circumscribed within certain limits and disposed under a few headings" (AT X 398). It is scarcely credible, then, that this Descartes would have agreed with the Second Meditation's assertion that we cannot conceive by imagination all the changes a piece of wax is subject to, or with the Sixth Meditation's claim that one can distinctly conceive plane figures without imagining them. After all, according to the Regulae, errors of intellect are for the most part due to omitting the concrete object of thought, which in these cases must be imagined.

The later Descartes abandons the cognitive necessity of imagining all quantities, that is, of all magnitude (continuously extended) and number (discretely numerable). Like the rules of motion in Le Monde, this, too, is connected to the doctrine of eternal truths enunciated in April 1630. The eternal truths, here and in later contexts, have first of all to do with fundamental mathesis, that is, not just mathematics but all those notions whose knowledge is common to all disciplines. In that first letter he told Mersenne that he was treating in his physics "several metaphysical questions, and particularly this: that the mathematical truths, those that you have named eternal, have been established by God and depend entirely on him, just as much as all the rest of creatures" (AT I 145). In Le Monde he refers to the eternal truths on which mathematicians base their most evident proofs, "following which God himself has taught us that he arranged everything in number, in weight, and in measure" (AT XI 47).^[3]

[3] Later, in the "Fifth Replies," Descartes says that denying the eternal truths would amount to maintaining that the whole of geometry was false (AT VII 381) and calls "immutable and eternal" "the essences of things, and those mathematical truths that can be known about them" (AT VII 380). In the "Sixth Replies," the eternal truths are both mathematical and metaphysical truths created by God (AT VII 436), and they seem to pertain to the entirety of creation (AT VII 432). In the "Third Replies," the "concepts or ideas of eternal truth" are associated with the essences of things (AT VII 194). In part 1 of the Principles, paragraphs 48-50 contrast eternal truths, "having no existence outside our cogitation," with perceptions of things and their affections; these paragraphs give examples of eternal truths like "Out of nothing comes nothing," "It is impossible for the same thing both to be and not to be," "What has been done cannot be undone," "That which thinks cannot not exist while it thinks"; they also approve the alternative name 'common notions' (AT VIIIA 23-24). Paragraph 75 places the knowledge of assertions like "Out of nothing comes nothing" outside the notions of God and our mind and before or alongside the knowledge of corporeal nature and of the senses (AT VIIIA 38).

The eternal truths were presented in the April 1630 letter as examples of metaphysical topics Descartes had been considering during the previous few months. The letter affirmed his conviction that he had found a way to prove metaphysical truths more certainly than geometrical ones. The root of these metaphysical concerns he described as "the obligation that all who possess reason have of using it principally in the endeavor to know God and to know themselves: It is with this that I attempted to begin my studies; and I will tell you that I would not have known how to find the foundations of Physics if I had not sought them by this route" (AT I 144). Those who assert that the justification of mathematics and the physical sciences or the refutation of skepticism is Descartes's chief concern must overlook this confession of his fundamental orientation, a confession that is consistent with his path of philosophizing from 1618 onward. It is what the first rule of the Regulae called the search for wisdom and what Rule 8 called "the noblest example," investigating one's own powers of knowing. "If as a question someone proposes to himself to examine all truths to the cognition of which human ratio suffices (which, it seems to me, ought to be done once in life by all those who seriously study to arrive at a good mind)," the person will discover, in accordance with the art taught by the Regulae, that nothing can be known without intellect; this, in turn, will lead directly to the enumeration of the only other instruments of knowing, sense and imagination (AT X 395-396).

B. IDEAS AND THE IMAGINATIVE PATTERN

Around 1630 Descartes was approaching, but only approaching, the divide between imagination and intellect characteristic of the late philosophy. In the Regulae they still cooperate in near-perfect harmony. Le Monde, although restricting the scope of imagination, assures for it an infallibility when it is confined to evident properties of extension. In this sense, the eternal truths, which guarantee the applicability of pure mathesis to extension, provide the foundations of physics.

The continuing discussion of eternal truths in the 1630 correspondence with Mersenne induced Descartes to emphasize that infinity lies beyond

the ordinary conceptions of people, who prefer imagining to knowing. And in 1638, Descartes recurred to the intertwined problems of infinity, imagination, intellect, and eternal truths in answer to Mersenne's question about whether there would still be a real space if God had created nothing. At first we think the question is beyond our mind's power, but it exceeds only the power of imagination—just like those other existence questions about God and our souls. Intellect can know that there would be not only no space but also no eternal truths, for example that the whole is greater than its parts (AT II 138, 27 May 1638).

Descartes eventually separated the issue of our knowledge of number from that of extension. This is evidenced by the Meditations' claim that we can have a clear intellectual perception of triangles even without imagining one. What underlies the claim is a distinction that he drew in correspondence with Princess Elizabeth in 1643 and that is also present in the Principles. There are very few "primitive notions" that form originals

on the pattern of which we form all our other knowledge: and there are only a very few of these notions; since, after the most general, of being, of number, of duration, etc., which are appropriate to everything that we can conceive,^[4] we have, for body in particular, only the notion of extension, from which follow those of figure and of movement; and for the soul by itself, we have only that of thought, in which are comprised the perceptions of understanding and the inclinations of will; finally, for soul and body together, we have only that of their union, on which depends that of the force that soul has to move the body, and the body to act on soul, in causing its sentiments and its passions. (AT III 665, 21 May 1643)

The basic conceptions of number and of eternal and mathematical truths are essentially grounded in the stock of notions that are most primitive of all, prior even to the distinction between body and soul or extension and thinking. This is what became of the Regulae's doctrine of natures common to both material and intellectual things. These natures, or notions, expressible in both reaims but not proper to either, are knowable only by intellect. Nevertheless, Descartes retained the idea that mathematics is greatly aided by imagination until the end of his life.^[5]

Contrary to the Regulae, Descartes now assigns the principal cause of errors to our attempts to use imagination in order to conceive of soul, or soul moving body. This marks a revolution in the thought of one who

[4] In the Principles, pt. l, par. 48, Descartes attributes special status to the notions of substance, duration, order, and number, which apply equally to extension and thinking (AT Villa 22-23).

[5] For example, to Princess Elizabeth, 28 June 1643 (AT III 691-692) and in conversation with Franz Burman (April 1648; AT V 176-177). Descartes refers to the ingenium mathematieum and mathesis ingenium throughout this latter passage.

around 1620 had claimed that wind could signify spirit and light knowledge and who in the Regulae had attributed error to a badly composing intellect that did not resort to imagination and sense. If one is Cartesian, this revolution will appear as (finally) getting things right. Yet the revolution in an important sense does not change anything about Descartes's universe except perhaps to regroup the various powers of sense, imagination, and intellect differently, into different constellations: their relative positions remain, but the way in which we see them relating to one another changes.

No single set of concepts can rationalize every one of Descartes's adversions to imagination from, say, 1637 onward. Yet it is possible to schematize the later understanding under a small number of headings.

1.     If the early theory of imagination stressed its activity, the later philosophy intensified a localization and restriction of the activity that had already begun in the Regulae. The distinction between common sense and imagination still present in Rule 12 was abandoned, the power of mind that was responsible for imagining was absolutely differentiated from the associated bodily functions, and its direct activity in the body was restricted to the pineal gland.

2.     In the later philosophy, especially in discussions postdating the Meditations, it is not the knowing force or intellect that acts on imagination but rather the will. In the later philosophy, will comes to be understood as the primordial activity of soul, whereas intellect is a passivity. Therefore one has to distinguish the receptive aspect of imagination, in which the mind attends to the impression, trace, or enforced movement of the pineal gland, from the productive formation of images by willing. In turn, one must distinguish between the contemplation of those images that are formed in the pineal gland because of the actions of the sense organs, nerves, animal spirits, or other parts of the mechanical system of the body from images that are produced by an autonomous act of will.

3.     Furthermore, a sharper distinction was drawn between the figure in the organ and the idea perceived in consciousness than was the case even as late as L'Homme. What is impressed in phantasia or the pineal gland is not what one directly experiences in thinking. Rather, the trace in the gland somehow gives rise to an idea in consciousness. There may be some resemblance between the two, but there need not be.

These tendencies and distinctions require one to conceive imagination along the following lines: The organ of imagination takes on figures chiefly in two ways, through sensation and through the act of imagining. The receptive part of mind (intellect) can be turned by the will toward the

pineal gland; when the figures or traces there come from the sense organs the result is sensation, whereas imagining proper occurs when the will makes a new impression in the brain with the "windows [of the senses] closed" (AT V 162), an impression of which the intellect takes note. In consciousness one does not in any case simply register the presence of the figure or trace in the imagination organ; the idea is not the organ trace. Moreover, besides the sense-directed and will-governed traces in the organ there can also be an undirected and ungoverned production of images that result from stirrings in the nerve and animal spirit system, one result of which is dreams.

Although Descartes had used the term 'idea' in his early philosophy, it initially and typically meant the image or look of a corporeal thing. Even in the Discourse on the Method 'idea' is often used in this sense, although it also takes on the newer meaning.^[6] With the Meditations, Descartes introduces the new sense with programmatic intent. It is in effect a generalization of the corporeal sense: 'idea' refers to the look of things in consciousness, to the forms of thoughts. In the "Second Replies," in complying with the request for a more geometric or synthetic presentation of the content of the Meditations, he explicidy defines the term. After specifying that 'cogitatio' is anything in us in a way that we are immediately conscious of it,^[7] 'idea' is defined as

that form of any cogitation whatever, through the immediate perception of which I am conscious of this very same cogitation. . . . And thus I call 'ideas' not only images depicted in phantasia; now here I in no way call these ideas, insofar as they are in the corporeal phantasia, that is, depicted in a certain part of the brain, but only insofar as they inform the mind itself turned toward that part of the brain. (AT VII 160-161)

Earlier in the "Second Replies" he distinguishes the nature of the idea from that of "images of material things depicted in phantasia"; the idea proper is "only that which we perceive by intellect either in apprehending, or in judging, or in discursive reasoning" (AT VII 139).

One of the most revealing characterizations of the idea is in the "Third Replies," to Thomas Hobbes. Contrary to Hobbes, who resolutely interprets ideas as corporeal or even as names, Descartes attempts to show that there exist genuinely noncorporeal ideas. He uses the term 'idea'

[6] For instance, contrast the strictly corporeal use of AT VI 55-56 to the ideas of God and soul of 34-35.

[7] He continues: "Thus all operations of will, intellect, imagination, and senses are cogitations. But I have added 'immediately,' to exclude things that follow from these, as voluntary motion indeed has cogitation for its principle, but nevertheless it is not cogitation" (AT VII 160).

for everything that is immediately perceived by the mind, to such an extent that, when I want and I fear, because I simultaneously perceive that I want and I fear, this same volition and fear are numbered by me among ideas. And I have used this word because it was already commonplace among Philosophers for signifying the forms of perceptions of the divine mind, although we recognize no phantasia in God; and I had none apter. (AT VII 181)

What is surprising is that this suggests that ideas in the noncorporeal sense are conceived by an analogy to the divine mind, but the divine mind taken contrafactually as though it possessed the apparatus of the internal senses that would allow it to perceive.

These passages show that even if the idea is meant to be distinguished, as residing in the mind, from the corporeal form or shape in objects or in the phantasia/pineal gland, the very concept is designed in analogy to and according to the logic of the corporeal idea and the system of sensing and imagining. So the workings of pure intellect are understood as analogical to those of imagination, although those workings in the most proper sense exclude the imagination. This logic of analogy-with-exclusion is exhibited in an exchange with Pierre Gassendi (in the "Fifth Objections and Replies"), who argued that the mind's supposedly clear understanding of a chiliagon was merely verbal and so just as "confused" as that of the image and that it involved at least an indistinct picture of a figure with many angles (AT VII 330-331). Descartes responded that since we can know many things most clearly and distinctly about it, it cannot be perceived either confusedly or merely in name. We have an understanding of the whole figure even if we do not imagine the whole. These phenomena of awareness show that understanding and imagination differ not just in degree in a single mental power but as two completely different modes of operation. "For which reason in intellection mind uses itself alone, but in imagination contemplates corporeal form. And although Geometric figures be entirely corporeal, nevertheless, with respect to them these ideas through which they are understood, when they [= the ideas] do not fall under imagination, are not to be considered corporeal" (AT VII 384-385; note the biplanarity of idea and figure). Thus one has a criterion of the difference: intellection is easier than imagination and is recognized in its uniqueness by a process and by results that are different from those of the corporeally dependent imagination.

Descartes therefore seems ready to argue that we know not just number apart from imagination but also geometry. Gassendi was right to detect ambiguity here, for what can it possibly mean to understand a chiliagon in complete and utter abstraction from imagination, not merely without a distinctly conceived thousand-sided figure in phantasia but without any

figure or even any sense of spatiality at all? In the period of the Regulae, Descartes might himself have considered this to be a monstrosity of badly applied intellect, the situation par excellence wherein by not imagining things concretely the intellect affirms absurdities.

Can the mind have a concept of extension without any form of imagination whatsoever? In answering we need to be careful not to take Descartes's self-understanding in a more extreme sense than he intended. Earlier in the "Fifth Replies," Descartes insists that

I also often distinctly showed that mind can operate independently of the brain; for naturally no use of the brain can be for understanding purely, but only for imagining or sensing. And although when imagination or sense is strongly accessed (as happens when the brain is disturbed) the mind is not free for easily understanding other things, we nevertheless experience that when imagination is less strong we often understand something quite different from it: as when in the midst of sleeping we notice we axe dreaming, there is a certain need of the imagination so that we be dreaming, but that we notice we axe dreaming requires only intellect. (AT VII 358-359)

In the Aristotelian-Scholastic theory of knowing by abstraction from phantasms there was virtual unanimity that knowing proper (i.e., the activities of intellect and discursive reason) was not the operation of any organ, but that was not to say that in human beings one could know without the assistance of the organs that produced the phantasm. Descartes is not arguing differently in this passage. Clearly he does not mean that we can notice and understand that we are dreaming in the complete absence of dreaming—quite the contrary—but that there is nothing at all in the activity of the brain, or of imagination as the having of traces in phantasia, that is itself a form of knowing or the proper instrument or organ of knowing. Knowing belongs to intellect alone.^[8] This is also one of the lessons of the piece of wax example, at the end of the Second Meditation: we have become accustomed since childhood to think that we see things like the piece of wax with our senses, but nothing in the senses knows or perceives the wax as wax. The imagination, although it can conceive different appearances that the wax might assume, cannot embrace the indefinite, seemingly infinite variety that is possible. Only the intellect is powerful enough to conceive the unity of substance through all the appearances and

[8] of course, Descartes went much farther toward the location of intellect in an organ than would have been acceptable to most Aristotelians by claiming that the soul was particularly situated in the pineal gland. One should notice that the distinction between the uses of intellect and imagination that Descartes makes in the passage is similar to the acts of intellect "on its own" in the Regulae, when intellect is used to set up a problem in initial terms and to conceive negations. See chap. 5, Sec. G, above.

possibilities, and it is intellect itself that perceives the existence of more possibilities than I have ever sensed or imagined.

The intellect transcends the limitations of sense and imagination, and the ability of the mind to imagine beyond the already or previously given depends on this transcending power. The proper objects of intellect are the things that it can perceive even in sensibles and imaginables that do not belong per se to those sensibles and imaginables: the ideas of the essences of things (like the waxness of the wax) and the eternal truths. So, for example, when we see that one piece of wax is larger than another, and a third is larger than the first, we are "seeing" these things by virtue of intellect, not of sense or imagination, and seeing that the third is larger than the first as a consequence of the first two perceptions is a judgment of will based on a clear seeing by intellect. We of course can also note, in turn, the principle of transitivity (If C is greater than B and B is greater than A, then C is greater than A ), which is properly speaking even farther removed from the particular sensations and imaginations, although the principle can be expressed through things in imagination and in the external world. These truths are graspings by the will-oriented intellect, graspings that are intrinsically shapings or informings of the mind, that is, thought-graspings. Another, more intellectualistic rather than voluntaris-tic way of putting this is that the appearances of things are illuminated by the light of reason that God has made part of our fundamental nature and that is the essence of us insofar as we are perceiving beings.

Thus it becomes evident why Descartes insisted that the eternal truths exist in the mind alone. This does not mean that the external world is in no way touched by the eternal truths (as though physical objects do not obey the principle of transitivity with respect to large and small) but that to find the principle one must look to the mind. There is no principle-thing "out there." The exhibition of the principle can take place through things that are "out there," but the only place that exhibition (or appearance) genuinely occurs is in mind.

The positions of the Regulae and the Sixth Meditation on intellect and imagination are not so far apart, then. The Sixth Meditation does not intend to investigate imagination for its own sake but tries to determine whether imagination as a faculty of mind is sufficient to establish the existence of something corporeal. The first task is to assure that it is distinct from intellection: that is what the chiliagon example accomplishes. The second is to use this difference to establish that something different in nature from intellect actually exists. Imagination unaided by sense makes this no more than probable. "Although I investigate everything accurately, nevertheless I do not yet see that any argument can be drawn from the distinct idea of corporeal nature that I discover [or invent] in my imagination

that necessarily concludes that body exists" (AT VII 73).^[9] While noting that I can imagine things that are perceived even better by sense, like color, sound, odor, and pain—whereupon the meditation proceeds to investigate sense—Descartes remarks that these things go beyond the imagery of "that corporeal nature that is the object of pure Mathesis" (AT VII 74). This repeats the formula 'pure mathesis' that occurred shortly before, at the end of the Fifth Meditation: "Now indeed innumerable [things], some about God himself and other intellectual things, some also about all that corporeal nature that is the object of pure Mathesis, can be plainly known and certain for me" (AT VII 7l).

The Fifth Meditation, which is rifled "Of the essence of material things; and again of God, that he exists," takes as an example of the ideas of things other than God and myself ("insofar as they are in my cogitation" and in order "to see which of them are distinct, which confused") the imagination of quantity. "Namely, I distinctly imagine quantity, which philosophers commonly call continuous, or the extension in length, breadth, and depth of this quantity or, better, quantified thing; I number in it various parts; I assign any magnitudes, figures, positions, and local motions to these parts, and any durations to these motions" (AT VII 63). It is in imagination, then, that we have a distinct notion of that nature that is the essence of mathematics and physics, extension. Once I imagine quantity—which, if we draw in advance on the explicitation of the actions of will in the post- Meditations period (see Secs. D and E, below; this explicitarion is in conformity with the dynamic mathematical imagination of Le Monde ), is an action of the will in phantasia perceived according to the idea of extension—I can make further active graspings of it, articulating extended quantity in ways that appear under the idea-forms of number, magnitude, figure, position, motion, duration.

But again the question intrudes: How, then, can Descartes assert that he has a clear and distinct understanding of a figure like the chiliagon without an image? Although it is possible that here lies an ultimate unintelligibility, there is a more charitable interpretation. Descartes grants in the Sixth Meditation that, "on account of the usage of always imagining something whenever I cogitate about a corporeal thing, I perhaps represent to myself some figure confusedly" (AT VII 72); thus in thinking a chiliagon I might represent to myself an image that is no more appropriate to a chiliagon than to a myriagon. The passage does not necessarily imply

[9] This reasoning suggests that necessity in mathematics does not ordinarily require argument but can get by with the clear seeing of intuitus. The kind of necessity required for the certain existence of bodies must come from arguments, not just the intuitus-seeing of corporeal images. For passages relevant to this distinction, see the preface to the French edition of the Principles (AT IXA 2) and the conversations with Burman (AT V 176-177).

that this use or custom is inessential to thinking about corporeal things, nor that extension is hereby confusedly imagined; in fact, it would appear instead that extension is imagined as such in this custom of cogitation, only it is not carefully articulated by the mind's distinct attention to its parts. Moreover, this absent articulation into figural parts, which to be present requires that the acies mentis, the sharp edge of the mind, be applied so that the sides, the angles, and the area are grasped simultaneously (all which would demand a great effort of the soul in the activity of imagining), is not necessary for understanding the pentagon or the chiliagon in distinction from other figures. Even in the Regulae the thought that a chiliagon is not a myriagon would be accomplished by intellect, not imagination. The intellect is in principle capable of making such articulations and such distinctions of number—or, to emphasize the activity, of articulating and numbering —but this capacity far outstrips the ability of a human being to actually, completely, and distinctly carry out the articulation in a present image. To produce a clearly and distinctly perceivable geometrical image, the imagination must constitute a real figure that embodies in concrete form an implication and intrication of natures, both simple and complex. The human ingenium is often not up to the task. Neither is the intellect, but its task is the different one of grasping limited aspects that need virtual rather than concrete realization.^[10]

These possibilities of applying the sharp edge of the mind—even the possibility of distinctly conceiving spatiality or extension in pure form, as was done at the beginning of the sixth part of Le Monde —amount to no less than ideas in their innateness. When Descartes pointed out to Hobbes that calling an idea innate did not mean that it was always showing itself to us, "but only that we have in ourselves the faculty of eliciting it" (AT VII 189), he was pointing to, without naming, this will-based power of drawing the forms of cogitation out of ourselves and applying and distinguishing them appropriately. All ideas as perceived are given their fundamental form by God's institution of our nature; those that we control—as opposed, for example, to the sensations of the external world that we do not control, although even they appear in accordance with the institution of our nature—we can summon forth at will (although how the willing is perceived is again a matter of the institution of our essence as thinking things and our nature as human beings).^[11] In this sense, we "have" the idea of extension in the purely spiritual power of the will to elicit it, even when there is nothing that we are actively imagining, and all the articulations of

[10] it would doubtless be fruitful to consider this distinction of Descartes in light of the Scholastic distinction between first and second intentions.

[11] See Sec. C, below, on the distinction between our essence as thinking things and our nature as human beings.

which that willing is capable can, in some way, be perceived by the mind even in the absence of an image.

The Fifth Meditation implicitly explains this, since, as an investigation of that corporeal nature that is the essence of pure mathesis and of matter, it is working in what Descartes understands as the distinct realm of imagination. The meditation discovers in extension not merely that things

thus viewed in general are to me plainly known and transparently seen, but beyond this also by attending I perceive innumerable particulars about figures, about number, about motion, and similar things, the truth of which is so open and in agreement with my nature, that provided that I first uncover these things, I seem not so much to learn something new as to be reminded of things that I already knew before, or to turn for the first time to these things that were long in me, although I had not before turned the gaze of the mind to these. (AT VII 63-64)

That is, extension is so constituted (by God) that having the general idea of it (in imagination), or further articulating it in accordance with "true and immutable natures," as the next paragraph calls them, is implicit and in perfect agreement with my nature. These natures or essences are ways in which I take hold of or conceive extension because my nature was created by God precisely as it is—in accordance with the eternal truths, as Descartes reminded Mersenne in 1638.

Once we understand these natures or essences and how they implicitly contain what we do not immediately perceive, we can argue by analogy that just as a triangle has certain properties and not others, even when we are not attending to them, so does God have the property of existence; the truth of existence is involved in the very idea of God, just as the truth of the relations demonstrated by a geometrical theorem is involved in the very idea of a geometrical object. These involvements are imposed by the essences, not by an arbitrary act of mind.

In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes responds to an issue that had been raised by Rule 12: whether things as grasped by the mind are like real things, and whether error is a matter of the mind's miscomposing elements (the natures of the Regulae ) that are true in themselves. As thinker I cannot guarantee the truth of what my mind puts together, but the constancy of the implications of truths in something elementally given to me by nature, even when I do not attend to those implications, assures me that some combinations of natures are simply given as such. The Regulae had not reached the level of thought at which this could be settled. It had only analyzed as natures the ways of grasping things and postulated that complex natures were in some way composites of simple natures; some complex natures might be necessary, others contingent, some might come about through impulse, others through conjecture, yet others through deduction

(AT X 421-424). The basis for these distinctions was not made thematic, however. The Regulae in its method had even allowed wide latitude to the cognitive use of fictions for imagining artificial dimensions along which things could be grasped in the process of problem solving. Natures in the Meditations, however, are no longer aspects or axes along which things can be compared, evaluated, and arrayed, but natures in the sense that Rule 5 had dismissed: natures as the essences of existing things.

The later philosophy can nevertheless be viewed as retaining a crucial element of the Regulae's conception of natures as aspects. Aspects are used in order to isolate essences, which, to be precise, are (except in the case of God) potentially existing essences.^[12] The Meditations in particular shows how one can distinguish the corporeal aspect from the noncorporeal aspect precisely by attending to the inability of the corporeal aspect to encompass or even to exhibit the aspect 'thought'. This can be recognized only through the direct experience of actual thought (in meditation), preeminently in the act of doubting the existence of everything, even of the doubt itself. The potentially existing essences must be enacted in cogitation, and in cogitation the mind is capable of comparing and distinguishing what is similar and what is different, though without the strict determination of proportion that had been the goal of the Regulae. The enactment of the cogito, for example, is viewed under the three aspects of ego, thought, and being, which are nevertheless inextricably united in the experience of the actuality. Exploring this actuality opens up a more distinct notion of the thinking aspect as it is wholly contained in the act of the thinker (distinct first of all from body, but secondarily distinguished into the different kinds or aspects of thinking), and the exploration of this actual thinking and its thoughts opens up the new dimension of its inability to account for its own existence (under the aspect of cause). The causal aspect then opens up the route to the experience of the necessity of the unlimited perfection of God as the only support for the actual thing I have experienced myself to be in the course of meditation.^[13]

Thus the kind of aspectual analysis of things introduced in the Regulae produces a way of arriving at an experience of the synthesis of the aspects in realities (not in fictions made up by cogitation), and these syntheses (the thinking ego, for example) lead in turn to new aspects that point to the ultimate synthesis of all, God. "For certainly I understand in many ways that that [idea of God] is not something fictitious depending on my

[12] Compare what the Principles has to say about attributes in pt. l, pars. 51-58, AT VIIIA 24-27.

[13] In the intellect's discovery that it is finite, and through this the recognition of posifive infinity, there is an analogy to the power of the intellect in the Regulae : it is the only faculty capable of recognizing the positive truth expressed in negation.

cogitation, but the image of a true and immutable nature" (AT VII 68). That Descartes called this idea an image is not surprising in view of what he told Hobbes, that 'idea' indicates the forms of the nonexistent divine faculty of phantasia. More significant, it means this: that the idea is like an image, an informing of a perceptive power, that reliably refers to and derives from a synthesis that is naturally instituted, that is, a true and immutable nature. The idea is to the nature as the image is to the corporeal reality. Both ideas and images are fundamental looks or aspects of things that bear the likenesses of their originals. That these aspects themselves are susceptible of a consistent and reliable unpacking of involvements and implications (ideas opened up by their aspects), their complexity of truth, is the surest mark of their bearing resemblance to the corresponding realities. For the mature Descartes, thought is articulated by ideas just as imagination is articulated by figuration, and all thought, having an idea and an object to which that idea refers (by virtue of its objective reality the idea points both to its existence as an essence and to possible and real individual instantiations), is intrinsically biplanar—this in a sense even more fundamental than in the Regulae, which was satisfied with a more speculative, that is to say, hypothetical, biplanarity.

C. IMAGINATION IN THE MEDITATIONS: THE ACTIVITY AND PASSIVITY OF THOUGHT

The Meditations tells us both that imagination is not required for my essence, for the essence of my mind (AT VII 75), and that it is in accordance with, proper to, "consentaneous" with my nature (AT VII 64). There is no contradiction because of the precise qualifications made and implied in the terms used. Imagination is not required for my essence, that is, my essence insofar as I am a thinking thing and "insofar as it [= the force of imagining] differs from the force of understanding." Because I, the meditator, have seen that my thinking is distinctly conceivable without the assumption of the existence of any real corporeal thing in it or connected with it, and because I have managed to think my being (or possible non-being) deliberately and prolongedly in arriving at the truth of "Sum, existo," I clearly and distinctly see that my thinking as thinking does not have any intrinsic, essential dependence on the corporeal. Having later, in the Sixth Meditation, noted that imagining a chiliagon requires an effort additional to that of conceiving it intellectually, I clearly and distinctly know that the power of imagining is not identical with the power of understanding, that the two are separable in principle. Imagination is not essential to thinking as thinking. Yet imagining is so natural to me as the being I am that there is nothing in it repugnant to my essence as thinker; furthermore, although this is not taken up thematically in the Meditations itself (see

"Appendix to Fifth Objections and Replies," AT VII 213), imagination is crucial to me as a human being, that is, as that union of body and soul that, although it is strictly speaking unintelligible to me, is constantly evidenced by daily life. Thus imagination is not essential to my thinking as thinking, but it is proper to my nature as a thinking, breathing, acting human being. This nature is, of course, the realm of what Descartes had in the Regulae called ingenium.

The Regulae ad directionem ingenii had investigated the knowing powers of the human being, an investigation called the noblest task for cognition, a task that had to be undertaken once in each person's life. The Meditations, although it appears under the guise of a metaphysics or first philosophy, takes on its metaphysical significance precisely by exploring the capabilities and limits of the sensitive and cognitive powers. Indeed, it is in essence a psychological, anthropological metaphysics, a metaphysics based in the direct evidence of the activities and receptivities of the human being.

In comparison with the Regulae, however, the Meditations is less sanguine about knowledge and wisdom. The Regulae had been undertaken in the confidence that anything we know is known with the same certitude as every other item of knowledge. Even though extended deductions and enumerations could strain the capacities of human ingenium, in principle all knowing was equal in certitude. The Meditations, by beginning with skepticism, introduces at the outset a criterion of differential dubitability—some things are more doubtful than others—that suggests the existence of differential knowability as its inverse. Depending not so much on a network of interrelated things and natures as on a hierarchy of certainties, the Meditations establishes God as most knowable of all, the self somewhat less so (and dependent on God); least knowable are sensations, which are more for the sake of preserving self than of truth.

This is not to say, however, that the Regulae is not in several ways a prerequisite to a Meditations -like outcome. For one thing, the Regulae established for Descartes the primacy of the phenomenological space of the conscious appearances, and in the first instance a correlated cognitive primacy of the space of imagination. By deciding to base knowing on the comparison with respect to the more, the less, and the same of things as they are grasped by the mind, he set out on the way of ideas that was a basic characteristic of his later philosophy, indeed of modern epistemology. Second, the Regulae set up strict criteria for knowing by giving pride of cognitive place to the clear grasp of things in intuitus and the derivative but nevertheless foundational thought-motion of deduction. Third, it raised the question (answered positively there) of the cognitive relevance of the senses and imagination to knowing. Fourth, it culminated in the postulation of an omnipresent active force in all cognitive operations, the vis cog-

noscens. And, fifth, it came to the threshold of the metaphysical problem, specifically over the issue of what natures are and whether they are in things in the same way that they are in minds.

There is a sixth prerequisite that has immediate relevance to the question of the imagination in the Meditations. The Regulae had argued for the primacy of imaginative techniques in the process of knowing, in the motion of thought; although the knowing force could act on its own, as pure intellect, any object of thought that in any way involved participation in a nature could be represented by a proportionalizing and serializing mathesis universalis.

The Meditations would seem to teach the near-irrelevance of the imagination to the most profound philosophical tasks. Yet it is easy to underestimate the degree to which even the Meditations is favorable to and dependent on the imagination (even imagination conceived in the narrow sense as the capacity for entertaining corporeal images). In the Regulae, imagination was the work of the knowing force in the phantasia organ; it was the dynamic production, reproduction, and transformation of images. If we emphasize this active character of imagination, then the work of imagination in the Meditations appears pervasive.

It is almost obvious, once pointed out, that the entire First Meditation is an exercise in imagination punctuated by insights of intellect into what the exercise reveals. Descartes first recalls his sensations, how they have worked and failed. He conceives what it would mean to doubt his physical presence sitting before the fire by "doubling" his view of it: he experiences it, and he imagines himself experiencing it as real although the reality is fallacious, for example, by imagining how a madman might experience the world. He recalls the unreality of dreams and thereupon reimagines his experience as a dream, then reviews the contents of the dream to see whether some part of it remains substantial. He imagines a deceiving God, alternatively a less than omnipotent Nature, that deceives him or makes him subject to error. Finally he concludes with the marvelous imaginary fiction of the malign demon that devotes all its efforts to making him err.

There is indirect testimony in Adrien Baillet's 1691 biography of Descartes that not only supports taking the First Meditation as imaginative but also suggests that the entire work is conceived according to the model of imagination. According to Baillet's marginal note, Descartes's close friend Claude Clerselier recorded in a memoir something told him by his brother-in-law, Hector-Pierre Chanut, who helped arrange Descartes's invitation to the court of Queen Christina of Sweden. Descartes "had often explained in conversation" that he "had never employed but very few hours per day on thoughts that occupy the imagination, and very few hours per year on those that occupy the understanding alone."

M. Chanut referred the first thoughts to meditation, for which M. Descartes wanted, according to him, one to give few hours per day; and the second to contemplation, in which our philosopher did not deem it necessary to employ many hours in an entire year, nor even in all one's life. According to this idea, M. Descartes called the works of the imagination meditation, and those of the understanding, contemplation. (AT X 203; emphasis in original)

Chanut's report bears more than superficial resemblance to a passage in the 28 June 1643 letter to Princess Elizabeth, which resemblance strengthens its credibility. In that letter Descartes begins by asserting that there are three kinds of primitive notions: those of soul, those of body, and those of the union of the two. Only pure understanding conceives soul; body can "be known by understanding alone, but much better by understanding aided by imagination"; the primitive notions of the union of body and soul are known obscurely by understanding, even with the help of imagination, but they are known "very clearly by the senses." Metaphysical thoughts exercise pure understanding and familiarize us with soul; mathematics, exercising principally the imagination, enables us to form very distinct notions of body. "Finally, it is in the uses of life and ordinary conversations, and in abstaining from meditating and studying things that exercise the imagination, that one learns to conceive the union of the soul and the body." He goes on to assert that the chief rule he has always observed in life is this:

that I have never employed but very few hours, per day, in thoughts that occupy the imagination, and very few hours, per year, in those that occupy the understanding alone, and that I have given all the rest of my time to the relaxation of the senses and the repose of the spirit; I even count among the exercises of the imagination all serious conversations and everything which requires having attention. (AT III 691-693)

The two passages taken together create an ambiguity about imagination's role in meditation. The passage, in Descartes's own words, from the letter to Elizabeth does not directly align metaphysical thoughts with meditations, but the alignment appears to be suggested by parallelism. After assigning (l) metaphysical thoughts and soul to pure understanding, and (2) mathematics and body to imagination, he gives the conception of the union of body and soul to the senses, especially in the ordinary practices and conversations of life. He expressly excludes from the latter (1) meditating and (2) studying things that exercise the imagination. The exclusion of meditation thus seems to correspond to an exclusion of metaphysical thoughts, and the exclusion of the study of things exercising the imagination to an exclusion of mathematics. But if for Descartes it literally goes without saying that conceiving the union of body and soul is not facilitated by metaphysics, then it is unlikely that meditation corresponds to

metaphysical thoughts. Moreover, it is just as easy to read "abstaining from meditating and studying things that exercise imagination" as meaning that one must abstain from meditating on those things that exercise the imagination as well as abstain from studying them. This reading is all the more defensible in that Descartes calls serious conversation and everything requiring attention exercises of imagination. In that case the 'metaphysical thoughts' that exercise pure understanding would refer to metaphysical thoughts as achieved and contemplated (the objects of Aristotle's theoria), rather than to the thoughts actively pursued by a mind engaged in a discursive search for metaphysical truths.

Chanut's report as narrated by Baillet may thus be quite accurate: 'Meditation' was used by Descartes to indicate an exercise of the imagination. This would not be an altogether extraordinary thing for an educated and well-read man of the seventeenth century to say, for the work of the imagination has long had a key role in the great meditative traditions of Western Christianity. In the Middle Ages the cardinal formulation of the psychology of meditative and contemplative practice came from the School of St. Victor in Paris, especially in the writings of Hugh of St. Victor and his successor, Richard of St. Victor. Their teaching was advanced by Aquinas in the "Treatise on Contemplation" of the Summa theologiae,^[14] and it was still canonical for the Jesuits of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century as they developed their understanding of spiritual exercises.^[15]

Hugh defined meditation in the most general sense as a species of cogitation: "a repeated cogitation that investigates the mode and the cause and the reason of every single thing. Mode: what it is. Cause: why it is. Reason: in what way it is."^[16] In "De modo dicendi et meditandi," Hugh gave a fuller statement about meditation and the specific role it plays in the

[14] Summa theolagiae, Ilae Ila, qq. 179-182, esp. q. 180, art. 3, obj. 1 and ad 1. Aquinas cites approvingly Richard's statement that 'contemplation is the rational soul's perspicuous and free beholding [contuitus ] of the things being examined; meditation, however, is the rational soul's intuition [intuitus ] occupied in the search for truth; whereas cogitation is the rational soul's looking [respectus ] that is prone to wander."

[15] S.v. "Meditation," Historisches Wörtetbuch der Philosophie, 5:963; and Dictionnaire de spiritualité, l:813. The latter shows that the participants in the Jesuit debate over the relation between imagination, cogitation, meditation, and Ignatian "application of the senses" for the most part simply accepted the Victorine framework as a given. For a discussion of the nature of Jesuit spirituality and the role of imagination therein, consult Antonio T. De Nicolas, Powers of Imagining: Ignatius de Loy ola. A Philosophical Hermeneutic of Imagining through the Collected Works of Ignatius de Loyola with a translation of these works, foreword by Patrick Heelan, S.J. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986).

[16] Hugh of St. Victor, "De meditatione," in Six Opuscules Spirituels, ed. Roger Baron, Sources Chr étiennes, no. 155, S érie des Textes Monastiques d'Occident, no. 28 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1969), 44. It appears in Migne, Patroiogiae Latinae, 176: 993-998, under the title "De meditando seu meditandi artificio."

general economy of psychic activity, quite apart from any specific object, religious or otherwise.

Cogitation is when the mind is passingly touched by the notion of things, when the thing itself is presented immediately to the rational soul by its image, either coming in by sense or arising from memory. Meditation is the assiduous as well as sagacious reconsideration of cogitation, striving to explain something obscure, or probing to penetrate something hidden. Contemplation is the rational soul's perspicacious and free intuition [intuitus] into things needing examination that are diffused all about.^[17]

In this passage meditation is more than just a species of cogitation. It stands intermediate between cogitation and contemplation. Cogitation and meditation are alike in being discursive powers of the rational soul or mind (animus); contemplation is immediately apprehensive (intuitive). All three stand in relation to the central manifold of sensory and memorative experience. Cogitation begins with the sensory and memorative images of things, in the presence of which the mind is touched by a notion (or concept); reconsideration of these cogitations with the aim of discovery constitutes meditation; and the recognition of something fundamentally unifying or pervading the manifold is contemplation.

These psychological conceptions were in fact implicitly rooted in the basic psychophysiology of the internal senses and the use of the imagination by intellect in both its discursive practice (ratio) and its immediate apprehensions (intellection). Richard of St. Victor, who followed Hugh's psychology closely, was, even more than Hugh, the acknowledged master of the theory of contemplation, especially in the works Benjamin Major and Benjamin Minor. In the Benjamin Major, he remarks that "cogitation [is] from imagination, meditation from discursive reason, contemplation from intelligence."^[18] Thought, cogitation, begins with the image; the image's presence passingly touches the mind with notions. This would appear to be at least a component of the classic function of the vis cogitativa in rendering judgments about particular things, that is, in moving from mere registration of sensations to judgments like "That's a tree.' Meditation then recurs to these image-induced cogitations in a discursive search for truth. Finally, the

[17] "De modo dicendi et meditandi," Patrologiae Latinae 176: 875-880; see p. 879. The Dictionnaire de spiritualité, 10:912, does not regard this work as Hugh's, but there is an almost identical statement in the certainly authentic "Nineteen Homilies on Ecclesiastes," Patrologiae Latinae 175: l 16-117 (where, in particular, intuitus is replaced by contuitus ).

[18] Migne, Patrologiae Latinae, 196: 66. On the roles Richard ascribes to imagination in the different stages of meditation and contemplation, see Raymond D. DiLorenzo, "Imagination as the First Way to Contemplation in Richard of St. Victor's 'Benjamin Minor,'" in Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s., no. 11. ed. Paul Maurice Clogan, 77-98 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982).

mind is blessed with a penetrating look that recognizes unity in the diversity of the meditated cogitations.

Although Hugh and Richard had theological purposes, their formulation of the psychology of imagination, cogitation, meditation, and contemplation is perfectly general, true for all objects of the mind. In this sense, Descartes's First Meditation is quite strictly meditational.^[19] For example, by calling to mind images of myself seated by a fire, wearing a winter dressing gown, holding a piece of paper in my hands—images that have touched the mind with notions—I reflect and re-reflect on how I or anyone else might doubt that these things, my hands, my whole body are here. In the course of this I gain various insights into the source of my conviction; other notions occur to me, stirred by other images and cogitations ("How would a madman judge all this?"), until it occurs to me that in sleep something happens almost every night that is quite similar to the mad experience as I have imagined it. And so forth. Worries over the certainty of mathematics of course count as both meditation and imagination, since for Descartes mathematics and the essence of materiality exercise the imagination in purest form.

We perhaps begin to see why Descartes told Elizabeth that serious conversations and matters requiring attention count among exercises of

[19] For some key interpretations of Descartes's Meditations as having roots in religious traditions, see Etienne Gilson, Etudes sur le role de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du systéme cartésien, Etudes de Philosophie Médiévale, no. 13 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1930), 186-187; Pierre Mesnard, "L'Arbre de la sagesse," in Descartes, Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie, no. 2, 336-349 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1957), and the discussion following between E. W. Beth and Martial Gueroult, pp. 350-359; Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Essays on Descartes' 'Meditations" (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1986), especially the first three essays: Rorty's "The Structure of Descartes' Meditations" (pp. 1-20), L. Aryeh Kosman's "The Naive Narrator: Meditation in Descartes' Meditations " (pp. 21-43), and Gary Hatfield's "The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive Exercises" (pp. 45-79); and Bradley Rnbidge, "Descartes's Meditations and Devotional Meditations," Journal of the History of Ideas 51, no. 1 (1990): 27-49. For more general reflections on the medieval and early modem use of imagination for meditative purposes, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 161-191.<HR>

There is also a small body of literature on doubt as an exercise of imagination. Especially important are Debra B. Bergoffen, "Cartesian Doubt as Methodology: Reflective Imagination and Philosophical Freedom," in Freedom, ed. George F. McLean, Proceedings of the American Catho lic Ph ilosophical Association 50 (1976): 186-195; and Bernd Rathmann, "L'Imagination et le doute: Essai sur la genèse de la penske cartésienne," Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 8, no. 15 (1981): 57-73. For an authoritative, standard interpretation of imagination in the Meditations, see Martial Gueroult, Descartes' Philosophy Interpreted according to the Order of Reasons, trans. Roger Ariew. 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984-1985), 2: 29-33. For an analysis of competing trends and innovations in the understanding of meditation in early seventeenth-century France, see Mino Bergamo, L'Anatomia dell'anima: Da François de Sales a Fénelon (Bologna: IlMulino, 1991).

imagination. Throughout his career Descartes had understood mathematics as preeminently the mathematics of proportion, and his universal mathematics was conceived as based in the strictly proportional participation of things in natures (in the mature philosophy, the participation was limited to the nature extension and its proper modes; in the earlier philosophy, he had conceived the natures more broadly). In some of his initial encounters with the power of imagination, however, for example, in his dreams of 10-11 November 1619 and in the imagery of poets, he recognized an intellectual use of corporeal things to figure spiritual things: symbols, analogies, intellectual images. This intellectual use was analogical to the use of figures to conceive corporeal things. Serious conversation and study, which certainly describe the First Meditation, especially insofar as it is a conversation of the meditator with himself, appear to be a logical extension from the intellect's use of images to its use of words. This extension would have been facilitated by Descartes's reconception of the problem of the possible resemblance of image and imaged around 1630 (and expressed in both Le Monde and the Dioptrics ) in terms of the basic nonresemblance of words to their objects. Nevertheless, words summon to mind various kinds of figures and ideas, and in the Regulae, Descartes had introduced the use of letters to stand for images. Therefore serious conversation and study can be conceived as a kind of imagining more commonplace than that of geometry and poetry, as the most frequently occurring form of discursive reason applied to the full range of human concerns. If Descartes conceived them as imaginative by a kind of analogy, it is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that we catch him in this type of argument.

D. WILL, IMAGINATION, DOUBT: GRASPING THE OBJECT OF THOUGHT

Everyone knows that the Meditations begins with doubt, or rather with the meditator's reflection that he has taken false things for true, and that this becomes a reason for wondering about the firmness of the rest of his knowledge. In general, the meditator motivates his doubt not by anything intrinsic to a particular experience or memory (i.e., there is not a "mark" attending experience that immediately signs it as true) but by reflecting that he has judged the same thing differently according to different considerations: for example, the building that from a distance looked round turns out to be square close up. Although we ordinarily assume that the close-up look that contradicts the distant one is veridical, all that matters for motivating doubt is that we recognize there are contradictory, though each in its own way apparently justified, judgments about the same thing.

In Hugh of St. Victor's tripartite scheme, these opening moves of the First Meditation are quite clearly meditation, that is, a reflection on or reconsideration of thoughts (cogitationes) arising either directly from the world by way of sense or indirectly by way of memory. What we have experienced in sense is now thought from the new perspective of having doubts. Thus the First Meditation is cogitatively biplanar. Perhaps it is even multiplanar, if the recursion of cogitation to what it has previously thought always introduces a new plane (thus one might recursively wonder about the doubt about the shape of the distant tower). For now, however, we can be satisfied with just the two planes.

Let us focus more intently to see what is at issue. Suppose at this moment you are gazing out a window at a distant building, a tower on the horizon. There is a haze, so that aerial perspective blurs the sharpness of detail. You drive past that tower every day on the way to work, so you know it has, say, a hexagonal cross section. While gazing at it now you wonder why it looks the way it does and struggle to recall its appearance on bright, clear days without haze. You try to summon up a bit of your college physics to see whether there is some principle that can explain why what is really angular looks rounded, and you try to imagine scenarios not previously experienced—at least not as far as you can remember.

It seems to me phenomenologically right to say that in this mental activity we are directly experiencing the biplanarity of thought—or, to put it in terms appropriate to this study, the frequently shifting biplanarity of the cogitative process. While you are looking at the horizon you are also wondering, that is, meditating, and in consciousness the sense perception and the wondering are taking place at different levels. It is difficult to hold too many different things in mind at different levels, however. For example, you can think about the view from up close as you look into the distance, but at that moment the doubting is displaced by a comparison. The situation is perhaps triplanar now, with the doubting thinker calling to mind the past scene against the background of the present scene. But here we might keep in mind the justice of the admonition of the Regulae to limit one's ingenium to two things at a time. Perhaps keeping three planes simultaneously in view exceeds our ordinary capacities; perhaps the apparent triplicity is the result of a rapidly switching attention rather than a genuine copresence. If you close your eyes and compare a more recent with a more remote scene, so that the two of them are apparently placed into a single plane, and then try to imagine yet a third scene, it is probably not possible to attend to all three at once, and even the simultaneous imagining of just two can be fraught with difficulty. In each of these cases, at least two of the four aids to knowledge cited by the Regulae (sense, imagination, memory, intellect) are being employed.

If we perform the kind of activity I have been describing, we will actually be engaged in meditation in the traditional sense of the term. Although it is an activity of thought that calls on more than imagination in the narrowest sense of picturing corporeal things, it does fall within the broader notion characteristic of Descartes's early philosophy. And certainly the subject matter of the entire First Meditation, which goes as far as doubting mathematical truths (and touching on the notion of God and powerful spirits, though these are not themselves so much subject to doubt as to methodical use), falls within the purview of imagination. The province of the First Meditation is therefore the realm of the imaginable, and the meditation necessarily involves summoning into imagination all imaginable things and trying to conceive—here, to imagine really and concretely—ways in which they can be doubted.

Moreover, actually undertaking meditation, as opposed to reading and judging the propositions that the meditating narrator affirms, helps clarify why the Meditations bears its title. Meditation is an intensive, prolonged act of thinking—one might say "cogitation" in the broad sense—directed toward insight into unifying truths ordinarily obscured by the variety of the things run through in discursive thought. In an Aristotelian vein, one might say that meditation is the conjuring of phantasms that enable one to attain the species that makes things properly intelligible. To go on in this vein, one can add that thinking is impossible without this kind of mental discursus. The question for a true reader of the Meditations is whether this way of conceiving the work fits Descartes's intentions.

If Descartes is interpreted as a textbook rationalist, the answer would be no. That is, the proper objects of sense and imagination are not intrinsic to the essence of the thinking thing, and so thinking without images or phantasms must be possible. The premier example would be "I think, therefore I am." No images, no phantasms are necessary for recognizing the truth of this assertion; in fact, images only get in the way of seeing that its truth rises above thinking in images.

The argument seems faultless. Yet there are several reasons to be uneasy with it. One is the very language in which this first truth, that which the meditator encounters in its full evidence, is couched. The Meditations itself does not use the phrase "cogito, ergo sum."^[20] Rather, it approaches this first doubt-resistant truth by recapitulating the thoughts of the First Meditation. The Second Meditation does not simply continue; it repeats the process of the First. "I will make an effort and attempt once more the same path that I entered into yesterday, by removing namely all that which

[20] They of course appear in the Latin translation of the Discourse (Ego cogito, ergo sum, AT VI 558; cf. the French at p. 32: ie pense, donc ie suis) and the Principles of Philosophy (AT VHU 7).

admits even a minimum of doubt, no less than if I had found it to be completely false" (AT VII 24). What follows is a dialogue of the mind with itself as it tries to put the testimony of appearances out of commission. The meditator supposes that everything he sees is false and whatever memory presents is deceitful; he imagines that he does not have senses and that body, figure, extension, motion, and place are chimeras. The intent is not to empty the mind of these things but to suspend their ordinary validity. They remain present to consciousness in their inexhaustible variety but are reduced to mere appearances. They are not annulled, but only their power to persuade the meditator that they (or their correlates) actually exist. The mind uses any tricks it can to undermine their ordinary testimony, including countervailing evidence, ad hoc hypotheses, and the fiction of the malign genius.

The method of the meditator is profoundly recursive. Appearances are doubted, they reassert their force, they are doubted with a new expedient. The meditator wonders whether there is something he has not thought of yet, something resistant to doubt; perhaps a God, "who sends into me these same cogitations," that is, the very sensations, imaginings, and ideas that he has been doubting (AT VII 24). But perhaps the meditator is the author of these cogitations instead. This makes him something, does it not? Yet he has already denied that he has senses and body. Is he not, however, so deeply bound to body and sense that he cannot exist without them? "But I have persuaded myself that there is nothing at all in the world, no heaven, no earth, no minds, no bodies." Again and again the appearances of sense and imagination reassert their evidence, though with ever-lessening force of persuasion. This is the recursively cogitative, the meditative situation par excellence: the attempt to think through, to see a unity in, a manifold of appearances. As the "synopsis" of the Meditations describes it, "in the second [meditation], the mind that, using its proper liberty, supposes all that not to exist, the existence of which can in the least be doubted, notices this cannot happen without it itself existing in the meantime" (AT VII 12). Again it is clear that the manifold of appearances is not put out of operation; rather, the mind comes to see that in all these appearances there is something that the corporeal, sensory, imaginal realm cannot account for.

As the immediate continuation of the "Synopsis" puts it, this discovery of self perduring through the experience of the doubtable "is of the highest utility, because in this way it [= the mind] easily distinguishes whatever pertains to itself, that is, to the intellectual nature, and whatever to body" (AT VII 12). What is ordinarily the focus for all thought, the experiences of sense and imagination, becomes the ground against which intellect truly recognizes itself. What was focus becomes background for a new point of focus. Without this background there can be no new focus or

foreground; without the plane of sense there can be no plane of intellect. Only after the persistent, successful attempts at doubting the truth of sense and imagination have prepared the way can the attempts to doubt the truth of self, of "I am, I exist,' be recognized as failures.

Without doubt, therefore, I also am, if he [= the deceiver] deceives me; and let him deceive as much as he can, nevertheless he can never make it happen that I am nothing as long as I shall be cogitating that I am something. So that, all things having been pondered sufficiently, and pondered even more [omnibus satis superque pensitatis], finally this pronouncement is to be established, I am, I exist, is necessarily true, every time it is proffered by me, or conceived by the mind. (AT VII 25)

The truth of this statement is not self -evident, but rather the act of pondering, of the intensive cogitation of everything that has been considered previously, makes the truth of the cogito appear. The mind "turns away" from distracting factors like sensation and imagination without forgetting or forgoing them, just as the intellect of the Regulae had to turn from the image of extended body without forgetting it to determine that extension is not body. It is only in the context of cogitating everything in view of the possibility of total nonexistence that it is possible to recognize that "I think, I exist" is true every time I think it.

One might adduce as counterevidence to my claim the status that "I am, I exist" takes on, once the Fifth Meditation gives warrant to the memory of whatever we have once clearly and distinctly known: predicating truth of the statement then no longer requires a preparatory meditation. But of course memory cannot help unless one has at least once in one's life tried to doubt the assertion and discovered its doubt-resistance. The criterion of doubtability established in the First Meditation is that of actually finding a relevant way of doubting. To one view of a tower you oppose another view, and recognize that any deliverance of the senses might well be contradicted by another; to the certainties of everyday life you can oppose the experiences of madness and of dreaming; to the reflection that at least the elements or components of things must surely exist you can oppose the possibility that human beings are created fallible or that there might be a being that could present appearances without a corresponding reality. It is only against the background of these reasons for doubting— doubt itself is a kind of cogitation, discursive thinking from item to item, if only from thinking to existence and back—that cogitation can recognize the resistance that the cogito offers to doubt. It is simply impossible to think and at the same time to take the thinking as nonexistent. One can of course apply a doubting functor to the proposition "I am, I exist" (let D represent doubting, and p the proposition, then D(p) stands for doubting the proposition), but that is not actual doubt. Nor is the doubt of the

nominalist, who to every assertion counterposes "God could make it otherwise." These are pretenses of doubt, not the real thing in its concrete actuality. Genuine doubt requires the biplanarity of entertaining the phantasm or idea and attempting to stand back from it in doubt. One either succeeds in this standing back—then the doubt triumphs, and one has placed the doubted appearances at a greater distance from the core of one's experience—or, as in the case of the cogito, it fails because one finds that one cannot actually succeed in stepping out of the existence of oneself thinking.

The form of the argument in the Meditations is, I believe, purer than that of the Discourse and Principles formula "I think therefore I am," insofar as it is more neatly aligned with the doctrines of intuitus and natures from the Regulae. As one clearly and attentively grasps one's current thinking of things, one recognizes that being always accompanies the act of thinking (recall that in the Regulae it is always best to have an actual instance of what is in question before the mind's eye, and even the body's eye, when that is possible).

We conclude that the Second Meditation is as much a biplanar, meditative cogitation as the First (we have already recognized that the end of the Second Meditation, which reflects on the piece of wax, is meditational, even imaginatively meditational). We may still be inclined to think that we need to go beyond imagination in order to come to the insight of the cogito, however. That is correct as far as it goes but is nevertheless misleading if it is taken to imply that images must be eliminated. As early as the Regulae, Descartes had asserted only that one might try to keep the imagination as much as possible from any determinate images. The Third Meditation begins with a reflection that one needs the hypothesis of the falsity of the images of corporeal things because it is not possible to rid one's mind of them.^[21] Descartes is not presenting something like John of the Cross's first night of the soul, the death of the soul to external and internal sensibility, but rather having us see in every activity of the mind the nature thinking (cogitation). One does not get rid of images but imagines that nothing corresponding to them exists, in accordance with the hypothesis of the demon. One thinks through images but treats them as show rather than as reality.

[21] Rule 12 had noted that when the intellect is concerned with matters not corporeal and with no resemblance to the corporeal "the imagination must, as fax as possible, be divested of every distinct impression," whereas sensation is to be closed off (AT X 416). That is, it is strictly speaking not possible to close off imagination. In comparison the Meditations is more insistent about the inevitable continuity and omnipresence of imagination in mental life; imagination cannot be put out of action, so it must be disarmed by the cogitative power of doubt.

The point I am insisting on is that one comes to the truth of the cogito without putting the imagination out of operation: the intellect is such that it sees through the appearances to a different kind of existence, the existence not of the objects but of the thinking. It does this by a kind of negation that in the sense of the Regulae is intellect acting on its own. In Rule 14, Descartes argued that the proposition "Extension is not (identical with) body" is known by the intellect alone, or by the intellect averting itself from any particular figures in the organ of imagination. In the Second Meditation, "Thinking is nothing, it does not exist" is something that could only be adjudged by intellect alone, averting itself from all particularities of its particular modes and thoughts.

In the strict sense, the Second Meditation describes imagination as the contemplation of the figure of a corporeal thing (nihil aliud est imaginari quam rei corporeal figuram, seu imaginem, contemplari ; AT VII 28). At AT VII 29, cogitation is said to form the images of corporeal bodies. Note the distinction: it is the activity of thinking or cogitation that forms the images (imagination as productive imagination), but seeing images as such is an act of immediate apprehension, thus called contemplation. When I look at a figure of a corporeal thing as the figure of a corporeal thing, I am imagining in the narrowest, apprehensive sense of the term. The mind adds to this mere apprehension of images a dynamic power of not resting with a single image, which leads cogitation and imagination to form new figures and to move from one to another. But if there were only the apprehension of corporeal figures, the recall of past sensations, and the variation, involution, and evolution of images, we would fall short of knowledge as Descartes understands it. This is the point of the piece of wax example. Imagination cannot encompass what the piece of wax is, cannot comprehend or even, properly speaking, perceive it. That is not to say that I have an abstract idea apart from any image or sensation whatsoever of the wax: when I have its image or sensation present in mind, I can perceive or comprehend the wax not by virtue of the particular act or image in the pineal gland, nor by virtue of any finite number of variations in imagination or sensation, but only by a power of mind that sees past the diversity of all real and possible appearances to the wax as wax. That same power is also able to see through the image of the wax to the presence of the perceiver.

E. COGITATION AND THE OMNIPRESENCE OF WILL

In the last analysis a dispassionate reader might still want to conclude that one must beware of "overimaginalizing" the Meditations and the later philosophy of Descartes. So, for example, one might conceive the cogito as indeed proceeding meditatively through the cogitations of sensation and

images and rising to the figures of intellectual imagination (like the expedient of the powerful demon) but insist finally that the moment of evidence must bring with it the complete quiescence of imagination. If one means by quiescence that no particular image needs to be imagined, and that any specific figure in phantasia could only tempt us to focus on its imaginal character rather than on the presence of thinking-being, then that is quite right. But, by contrast, one cannot demand the quiescence of cogitation, for it is precisely in and during the reiterated attempts to doubt one's own existence that the truth of the thinking-being shines through. One has prepared the way for this by suspending the reality claims of all appearances without annulling the appearances per se. One looks at them, regardless of their specific content and drift, as no more than appearances. One focuses on the thinking here and now—one's very own thinking— and on what existence or, better, nonexistence could mean and sees that this present "thing" cannot be conceived as not being. There is nothing in principle that prevents the mind from achieving this end with corporeal images in mind, for one can see beyond the particular images to the presence of the cogitation. And if language is closely linked to imagination— certainly every time I say to myself "I am, I exist" a phantasm dependent on organic memory of language is evoked—then the argument holds in an even stronger sense. Each time one tries to doubt the linguistic formula one looks through it to its meaning. It is this power of looking-through that is proper to intellect and that can in no way be found in senation or imagination taken apart from intellect. To turn things around, however, without sensation or imagination there is no mental content to understand. In every case the intellect needs some presence to think about.

The ultimate test of my thesis is the case of the idea of God, which can have nothing corporeal about it. Yet even here, in the proofs of the existence of God, the core of my contention is still supported. The Third Meditation's first proof, which argues according to what causes ideas, and the second, which proceeds according to what causes the being of a meditator who is capable of having the ideas that appear to it (including that of God), are both undermined if we take them as eliminating all previous sensations, imaginings, and other cogitations. What I do is not eliminate them but suspend my confidence that they are something outside of my consciousness; this is what introducing the plane of the objective reality of ideas accomplishes. The representative value the ideas have regardless of whether they are formally realized in a worm apart from my consciousness is the topos that gives the proof a content, since like anything else this objective reality either is self-subsistent (and thus requires no cause) or is caused. I am led to the idea of God (and then to his formal existence) not by turning away from these things but by meditating and seeing that the content of sensation and imagining leads me along a chain of present

causation that must go beyond the sensible and the imaginable, and must go beyond my finite sell It is the chain of all this mental experience that provides the background (a plane!) against which the evidencing of the truth can be clearly and distinctly grasped.^[22]

Even the last three meditations, which often seem to be more treatise-like, retain a meditational and at least quasi-imaginative character. One can certainly grant that in the latter parts, especially in the Sixth Meditation, Descartes is intent on reaching the foundational notions of his physics, but his basic goal remains the same: to consider things and then attentively to reconsider them in light of a new question. For example, in the Fifth Meditation he reflects on how certain ideas, mathematical ones, involve a necessary entailment of properties that are not immediately evident until they are unpacked by analysis; by analogy, he turns to the idea of God to show that there is an entailment in the idea of him that is unlike the entailment in any other idea, that of formal existence. He is thus seeing the idea of God against the background of mathematical ideas, which are the least corporeal of all imaginable things but nevertheless the essence of the corporeal. In the Sixth Meditation there is a protracted meditation on how close imagination can bring us to the assertion of the existence of something corporeal; then, against this background, Descartes shows that sensation can achieve the proof of what imagination cannot, despite the fact that we are sometimes deceived in our sensations (a reevocation of the First Meditation). In virtually every movement of thought in the Meditations (as in the classical, premodern form of meditation), Descartes resumes his previous considerations and, where possible, takes up again considerations that in one way or another were put aside or left incomplete. The Meditations has a sense of closure precisely in this meditational character: the attempt to survey, think through, and penetrate a field of experience.

Have I not, however, ended by confusing imagination and discursive thought (ratio)? Here a distinction between the activity of thought, the recognitions in thought, and the objects of thought is appropriate and helpful and is in fact intrinsic to the logic of Descartes's psychology of the

[22] Descartes's understanding of the temporality of thought's self-evidencing is much more radically "presentist" than the preceding traditions of psychology. There is no validation of any kind of memory before the Fifth Meditation, so whatever truth is established before that must derive from the simultaneous presence to mind of the different relevant planes. The temporal process of meditation helps one rise to the moment when one is finally able to see past the confusing mass of cogitations to their relationships in simultaneity. For discussions of temporality and temporally bound attention in Descartes, see Jean-Marie Beyssade, La Philosophie première de Descartes: Le temps et la cohérence de la métaphysique (Paris: Flammarion, 1979); and Thomas M. Carr, Jr., Descartes and the Resilience of Rhetoric: Varieties of Cartesian Rhetorical Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990).

human being. The two-imaginations note of the "Cogitationes privatae" conceived imagination as the use of corporeal figuration, whether the ultimate object was corporeal or not. In this sense, the Regulae understood anything that needed to be figured out as under the sway of imaginative mathesis universalis. Imagination was in essence identified with discursive thinking (recall the alternative use of "motion of cogitation' and "motion of imagination" in Rule 7). In the course of thinking or meditating, one comes to various stopping points, that is, to insights. In the era of the Regale, Descartes was willing to allow insights (intuits) of mind or intellect and of the senses. The Meditations "corrects" this: in the proper sense we never intuit with the eyes, ears, or nose, but only with the perceptions of mind. Imagination and sensation themselves as apprehensive powers are due, properly speaking, to the mind's act of perception. Descartes’ incipient understanding of this, apparently in the late 1620s, was marked by his formal definition of imagination, in Rule 12, as the application of the knowing force to the phantasia organ. The difference between imagination and intellect was therefore not so much between two powers as between two locations (or one location and the absence of location); the knowing force was at work in both, in the one case within phantasia, in the other case without.

If instead of activity or the agent of activity we emphasize instead the ultimate object of thought, then one can quite sharply distinguish imagina-tional from nonimaginational thought; the former deals with traces in the pineal gland, the latter with intellectual ideas. The trick, however, is to distinguish the ultimate object of thought from all intermediate objects. In Scholastic psychology the phantasm is omnipresent in thinking as an intermediate object; beyond it lie both the abstracted intelligible species and the real thing or things to which the phantasm corresponds. Descartes’ psychological theorizing, both early and late, is in effect a protracted reflection on the status of the phantasm as intermediary of thought. In the "Cogitationes privatae" he recognized a biplanar power of figuring things: an experience of bodies could be deepened by conceiving them with figures; in turn, one could use those bodies, or the mind's grasp of them, to figure spiritual things. In the note concerning the art of memory he went so far as to conceive of understanding as the evolution of one phantasm out of another according to cause—a dream of understanding that be partially realized in Le Monde and the Geometry. In the Regulae, Descartes attempted to explain all knowing as taking place through the mind's grasp on things and identified different planes therein underlying the universal applicability of proportionalizing mathesis. In the Meditations, Descartes starts by trying to reduce everything to a single plane of consciousness— perhaps there is nothing beyond the pure appearances—but discovers, by the comparative evidence of the ideas in their resistance to this reduction,

that there are discrete planes within consciousness (e.g., sensation, imagination, intellection, will) and in reality (God, self, material reality).

The Meditations is therefore the most radical effort to explore what can be known by way of figures (taken in the very largest sense) grasped by and contained in the mind. The mind is led away from the senses, first to the power of imagination—of calling to mind, contemplating, varying, and interrelating images detached from immediate sensation—and then to the power of seeing through and beyond these, the power of intellection. But intellection, to work, always requires something, some object or presence that it can grasp. For most people most of the time, these are the things and activities of everyday life, chiefly corporeal things. For those who devote themselves to investigation and study, the mind regrasps these things in a certain detachment, for example in the ability to reconceive things under the forms of mathematics, and, rising to a higher level, it grasps the universal mathesis behind all mathematics. Those who at least once in their life turn to metaphysical subjects can again regrasp these things and see beyond them to self.

Perhaps—but until we gain a clearer experience and understanding of Descartes and his meditative-imaginative thinking this is only a perhaps— we can, for a few moments, rise above all sensation and imagination in any and every form, in a kind of dark night of these powers of soul, and gaze with pure intellectuality on the highest spiritual realms. Still, as long as our nature is human and it is part of our nature to imagine and sense, this can last only a short while. The key to this inability to remain with the purely intellectual is what Descartes ultimately identified as restlessness of soul, a topic that brings us back to the questions of the soul's activity, the imagination, and, most fundamentally of all, will.

In a letter of 2 May 1644 to Denis Mesland, a Jesuit devotee of Descartes’ philosophy, Descartes discussed whether human beings really have the volitional power of indifference with regard to whatever we see very clearly. (He had argued in the Fourth Meditation that will consists in our ability to do or not to do something, which presupposes a variety of indifference; see AT VII 40-41.)

For it is certain, it seems to me, that "from a great light in intellect follows a great propensity of will"; in the manner that, seeing very clearly that a thing is proper to us, it is very hard, and even, as I believe, impossible, while one remains in that thought, to arrest the course of our desire. But, because the nature of the soul is to be attentive almost only for a moment to a single thing, as soon as our attention turns away from the reasons that make us know that this thing is proper to us, and we retain in our memory only that it appeared desirable to us, we can represent to our spirit some other reason that makes us doubt it, and thus suspend our judgment, and even perhaps

form one contrary to it. Thus, since you do not put liberty precisely in indifference, but in a real and positive power of determining oneself, there is between our opinions a difference only in name; for I avow that this power is in the will. But, because I do not see that it is otherwise when it is accompanied by indifference, which you avow to be an imperfection, than when it is not accompanied by it, and that there is nothing in the understanding but light, as in that of the blessed who are confirmed in grace, I call free in general everything that is voluntary, and you want to restrict this name to the power of determining oneself that is accompanied by indifference. (AT IV 115-116)

Already in the Compendium musicae, Descartes had noted a kind of restlessness in the soul. Although certain simple harmonies were better accommodated to sense than others, the soul was not satisfied with these alone hut longed for variety instead. The complex rhythms and harmonies of song are more satisfying than a constant consonance. The imagination was the faculty that strove to figure out the complex unity that makes a song more than a sequence of notes. There is a similar restlessness in finding and solving problems; recall the trait in himself that Descartes noted of wanting to find the answer for himself whenever he heard that a problem had been solved or a discovery made. There is also a restlessness that the Regulae was designed to adapt to human ingenium and control, the tendency of human thought to wander when it is not methodical and does not ground its movements in the clear recognition of simple things, a clear seeing that might be arranged in unambiguous sequences never requiring attention to more than two things at a time. There is the restlessness in the Meditations of a will that acts when it is insufficiently informed, a malady that Descartes decided had to be cured by drawing people away from the habit, codified among the philosophers of the School in their Aristotelian empiricism, of taking sensation as the foundation for even the most abstracted knowledge; this ill-founded habit was to be replaced by the new one of achieving clear and distinct insights, capable of preserving oneself from error. The co-meditating readers could be healed by discovering for themselves the innate power, not intrinsically corporeal or imaginative, that constitutes their innermost being: the power of cogitation that considers what is present to it and gives rise to ideas or forms of consciousness and that in turn can give rise to yet other ideas. The ultimate telos and the ultimate support for this power is God, in whom the restlessness of the soul could finally be stilled (as it is for an extended moment in the contemplative conclusion of the Third Meditation).

The shifting role of will in Descartes underlies a standard topic of Cartesian scholarship: the problem of the change in his theory of judgment between the period of the Regulae and of the Meditations. In the Regulae

judgment is an act of intellect; in the Meditations and thereafter it is an act of will affirming or denying what the evidence of the intellect offers to view. Yet this is not so much a change in the nature of judgment as a change of mind about the names applicable to the configuration of the human psyche and its powers. The active search for truth that the Regulae aims to direct was driven by the vis cognoscens' will to know, even though Descartes did not expressly say this or perhaps clearly recognize it. That work does not attempt to delimit or define will other than to mention in Rule 1 that one searches for truth not so that one can solve problems posed by philosophical schools "but so that in the individual events of life the intellect might show forth to the will what ought be be chosen" (AT X 361). But in the intellectual realm it is the knowing force that decides how to take what it sees and what to do with it; that is, the knowing force governs cogitation and its motions. Indeed, in the final analysis, the knowing force is that cogitation and that motion. Cogitation is the directed action of what, when undirected, is an aimless agitation of thought.

F. PASSIONS OF SOUL, ACTIONS OF WILL

According to the Regulae, when vis cognoscens acts in phantasia it is called imagination or conception, and when it acts with phantasia on the senses it is called sensation. The power of conception has a passive side, in that when it grasps by sense, imagination, or intellect it is receptive; a major portion of this receptivity is organic (impressions are passed from external sense organ to common sense to phantasia to vis cognoscens). But even more fundamental to conception is the active, formative side. Not coincidentally, both the active and the passive are united in the ingenium, defined as the vis cognoscens when "it at one moment forms new ideas in phantasia, at another applies itself to those already made" (AT X 416). That force of making and attending to images, conceived more generally by Descartes, becomes the power of making and attending to ideas. One could call it intellectual imagination, the analogue of corporeal imagination that allows us to recognize intellectual things.

In the course of his career Descartes ever more explicitly ascribed this formative power to will and even conceived imagination in the corporeal sense as a direct act of will rather than of knowing. The cogitative power of forming, attending to, and varying ideas is above all an act of willing; only the passive power of seeing remains to intellect. Therefore, cogitation, the act of the res cogitans that recognizes its own being in what is called the cogito argument, is not, as we commonly think, intellection; it is willing.

The Passions of the Soul is clearest about this primacy of will, although

the doctrine is already present in the Principles and just beneath the surface of the Meditations. Article 17 of the Passions, rifled "What the functions of soul are," says this:

After having thus considered all the functions that belong to the body alone, it is easy to know that there remains nothing in us that we have to attribute to our soul except for our thoughts, which are principally of two kinds: to wit, some are the actions of the soul, others are its passions. Those that I name its actions are all our willings, because we experience that they come directly from our soul and appear to depend only on it. Just as, on the contrary, one can generally name its passions all the sorts of perceptions or cognitions that are found in us, because often it is not our soul that makes them as they are, and it [= the soul] always receives them from the things that are represented by them. (AT XI 342)

Insofar as our souls act, they will. Since the being of a thing is more properly designated by its fundamental activity than by its passivities, if I am a thinking thing, I am first and foremost a willing thing.

The next two articles elaborate the emergent primacy of the will.

Article 18. On Will.
Our willings, in turn, are of two kinds. For the ones are actions of the soul that terminate themselves in the soul itself, as when we will to love God or generally to apply our thought to some object that is not material. The others are actions that terminate themselves in our body, as when from the sole fact that we have the will to walk it follows that our legs move and we walk.

Article 19. On Perception.
Our perceptions are also of two kinds, and the [first] ones have the soul for cause, the others the body. Those that have the soul for cause are the perception of our willings, and of all the imaginations or other thoughts that depend on it.^[23] For it is certain that we are not able to want any thing without our perceiving by the same means that we want it. And although with regard to our soul this would be an action of wanting some things, one can say that it is also a passion in it to perceive that it wants. In any case, because this perception and this will are in effect one and the same thing, the designation is always made according to what is noblest; and thus one is not accustomed to name it a passion, but only an action.

Article 19 therefore not so much puts perception on an independent footing as explains its connection with and subordination to willing, which is again emphasized to be active and so prior to what is dependent on it.

[23] The antecedent of this 'it' (qui en dependent) I take to be 'soul', although it could be 'willings', an alternative that would make my argument stronger. Presently we shall see that imaginings are understood in the Passions as primarily acts of will.

For the moment it is left unclear what the status of "all the imaginations or other thoughts that depend on it" is; but only for the moment. Article 20 explains that imaginations and our other thoughts are caused principally by will.

Article 20. Of imaginations and other thoughts which are formed by the soul.
When our soul applies itself to imagine some thing that is not, as in representing to itself an enchanted palace or a chimera; and also when it applies itself to consider some thing that is solely intelligible, and not imaginable, for example, to consider its proper nature: the perceptions that it has of these things depend principally on the will which makes it perceive them. This is why one has the custom of considering them as actions rather than as passions.

Articles 21 through 26 take up the remaining perceptions, those "that are caused by the body," that is, by way of the nerves and the motions of the spirits (animal spirits) in us. These include dreams, reveries, and illusions; the nerve-mediated perceptions that I ascribe to external objects (sensation); the nerve-mediated perceptions of bodily sensation (hunger, thirst, pain, heat, etc.); and the perceptions, caused chiefly by movements of the spirits, that we ascribe to the soul as joy, anger, and the like, which turn out to be the proper subject matter of the Passions of the Soul. What this taxonomy indicates is that our hope to preserve the independence from willing of intellection proper is in vain. Every thought, every perception is caused either by body or by will. The imagination of things that do not exist and the consideration of solely intelligible things are in essence willings before they are perceivings, not because of a temporal precedence but because the activity is prior to the passivity.

Some of the language and context of the Passions discussion is reminiscent of the Regulae. In the Regulae the nerves were cited as the vehicle for transmitting motions to the body (but not for conveying the impressions of the senses to the organs of the brain); Descartes refers to "the motive force or the nerves themselves" (vim motricem sire ipsos nervos [AT X 414], a phrase apparently implying that producing bodily motions is the fundamental task of the nerves). In the Passions, by contrast, the nerves are primarily responsible for the sensation of objects and feelings of pain, heat, and so forth, because their central fibers transmit motions produced in the external world and even within the body to the pineal gland. The nerves also play a role in moving the parts of the body because of their peculiar structure. They consist not just of fibers but also of the surrounding nerve sheath, which contains animal spirits. It is these spirits that are the medium proper for transmitting images and impressions from the pineal gland

region to the rest of the body in order to effect movement and other somatic changes.

In articles 18 and 20, in the passages "as when we want to love God, or generally to apply our thought to some object that is not material" and "when our soul applies itself to imagine some thing that is not . . . and also when it applies itself to consider some thing that is solely intelligible, and not imaginable" (AT XI 343, 344), the Passions broaches an important theme of the psychological theory of Rule 12 of the Regulae. There, the vis cognoscens (sometimes under the name 'intellectus') was said to apply it-serf to the organ of imagination and, through that organ, to the common sense, in the processes of imagining, sensing, and moving. Although what power is applied to what other power or thing changes from the Regulae to the Passions, all these passages raise the issue of attention in Descartes’ philosophy, that is, of the application of the mind to one thing and then to another. This theme is at least tacit in all of Descartes’ writings, and it suggests the degree to which the question of will's presence in all thinking, of will as the truly active aspect of soul, is recurrent throughout the entire Descartes corpus.

Remaining in a single thought requires a resolute will able to maintain the perception that is at the focus of its attentiveness, but the nature of the human soul is such as to make it difficult to remain in a single thought or to hold a single object before our minds for very long. This is in fact a negative characterization of the human mind as it exists on this earth as discursive and cogitative, moving from one thing to another and, in a positive sense, trying to achieve some unity or unitary vision or at least sequentiality out of the discursion. The only defense against mental wandering is the resoluteness of the will that arises from the thirst for truth and the overwhelming attractiveness that a clear and distinct grasp provided by the light of reason (or of grace) lends to the object of one's attention (though, as we have seen from the letter to Mesland, not even this attractiveness is sufficient to hold the mind for very long). Cogitation is driven by the restless desire of the will to become clear about its various objects. It is because of a difference in the nature of some of the appearances—those that are clear and distinct by virtue of the light of reason/nature or the light of grace—that this restlessness can sometimes be quelled and the desire can find a sure guide to the actions it initiates. Even when these restlessness-quelling appearances are present, however, it is difficult for the soul, bound as it is to temporal change, to hold on to the insights it has gained. Thus cogitation has a twofold condition: it is the product of the will, and it is the product of temporality.

In a 6 October 1645 letter to Elizabeth that discusses the passions and emotions, Descartes makes perfectly explicit the role of will in imagination.

"When it [= the soul] uses its will to determine itself to some thought that is not only intelligible but imaginable, this thought makes a new impression in the brain, that is not a passion in it but an action, which is properly named imagination" (AT IV 311).^[24] The consequences of this passage and the Passions' account of will and perception are unambiguous. The essence of the soul is conceived preeminently in its actions rather than in its passions, and the actions of the soul are properly speaking acts of will; moreover, imagination is one of these actions. What remains to intellect is a passivity with respect to both body and will. Things happen to the soul, and if the soul wills to attend to these, it is said to perceive. But intellect per se can do nothing with these perceptions, nor can it see something in more than a marginal sense unless will directs it. If the human being as aware is precisely a res cogitans, and if only two kinds of thoughts or cogitations can be attributed to the soul, perceptions and willings (see the Principles, pt. l, sec. 32, AT Villa 17),^[25] the Passions reconceives these as not parallel or independent but as arrayed in ontological hierarchy, with the actions of will prior to the passions of intellect. Intellection (i.e., perception) is, in the proper sense, just the passive or receptive registration by the soul of its willing.

Both imagining and applying our mind to immaterial things are actions of will. In this way imagination is more intimately of the essence of the active thinking thing than is the perception of intellect. All formation of thoughts and all transitions from thought to thought are acts of will; the seeing of the thoughts' forms is the receptivity of intellection, which presupposes that the will is attending to and has perhaps formed or elicited the idea that is seen. All discursive activity of mind—ratio as opposed to intellectus—is reduced to willing punctuated by occasional seeing. With this shift in his thinking Descartes totally abandons what had been an implicit goal of the Regulae : to reduce discursivity, the motion of cogitation, to a deductio or an enumeratio that might in principle be turned into an instantaneous, or very nearly instantaneous, seeing.

We have already seen indirect evidence that the Meditations is driven by will, but there are passages in which will's primacy comes to the surface, whether or not Descartes intended it at the time. The Fourth Meditation,

[24] This passage in effect inserts the common notions of the Regulae, instantiable in both the intelligible and the material realms, deep into the heart of human psychology, by suggesting that when the will turns the soul to a thought that is both intelligibly and materially conceivable, the thought is necessarily instantiated by an impression in the brain.

[25] The Principles, which was published in 1644, defines thought conformably to the definition given in the "Second Replies" to the Meditations, as “all things that happen to us conscious [beings] within us, insofar as the consciousness of them is in us" (pt. 1, sec. 9, AT VIIIA 7). It calls perception and volition the two modes of thinking and refers to them as operations of intellect and will, respectively (AT VIIIA 17), thus suggesting that both are activities.

in concluding that we never err if we refrain from judging what we do not see clearly and distinctly, teaches that the will must be guided by intellect (AT VII 59-62). Yet we also learn that the will in us is perfect in its kind and, not being restricted in any way or to any objects, is virtually infinite (AT VII 56-57). When I consider my intellect I see that it is finite, because it does not extend to everything, and I can easily conceive an even greater intellect than mine, perhaps an infinite one; but "it is will alone, or the freedom of choice, that I experience in myself so great that I apprehend the idea of none greater; to the point that it is principally this by reason of which I understand myself to bear [referre ] a certain image and likeness of God" (AT VII 57). In this light, my nature or essence is again better and more fully expressed by will than by intellect.

There arises a paradox, then: how can weak and finite intellect direct robust, virtually infinite will? If the post -Meditations theory of intellect and will were in force in the Meditations itself, this would mean that, since intellect is really the passive side of will, will must guide will. That would eliminate the paradox of the finite guiding the infinite, but leave the even greater one of how an errant will can guide itself unerringly and how the passive side of mind, intellect, guides the active side, will.

In a sense, the post -Meditations theory does hold in the Meditations itself: it is not intellect but will that guides will. Even in the terms provided by the Meditations this is so. If I decide to abstain from judgment unless I see things clearly and distinctly, there are in effect four parts will and one part intellect involved. Decision is an act of will; so is abstention; so is judgment; so is the attention to the thing being judged. This leaves seeing as the one part intellect, which in fact ends up as a criterion for will's being used not blindly but intelligently. Moreover, it is quite clear that the entire Meditations is a process directed by will, the will to truth. Doubting is an act of will, and the effort to doubt everything is in effect the attempt to put my mind in a state of indifference with respect to the existence of things.^[26] The fiction of the malign demon is introduced expressly as a device for readily inducing this indifference, which is difficult to achieve because of the inveterate habit of accepting things at face value—and a habit is a routinization of will.

On account of this, as I opine, I will not act badly if, the will being turned directly to the contrary, I deceive myself and for a time feign all those things to be completely false and imaginary, until finally, as though the weights of prejudices were equated on both sides, no more fully perverse habit will turn my judgment away from the right perception of things. (AT VII 22)

[26] Some sort of indifference to alternatives must be possible if will is to achieve the lowest level of freedom; see AT VII 58.

The will to truth turns itself against itself, even before it knows the truth, for the sake of achieving a truth that is still just a promise. Its effective instrument, a concretion of the imaginary terms of its own doubt, is the malign genius.

Even the clear and distinct ideas that guide the will away from error turn out to be dependent on will. Consider the clear and distinct truth of "I think, therefore I am" or "I am, I exist." Simply putting these statements before my intellect is not sufficient for recognizing its truth, at least not when I first encounter them in the process of meditation. I must exercise every resource I have to doubt them, above all, that of the will's imaginary deceiving demon. As much as I may will it, when I actively try to doubt the assertion, when I try to think myself out of existence, I fail. It is this failure of the will to accomplish its purpose of doubting that is the background against which the clarity and distinctness of the idea can shine out; without this there is no clear and distinct truth. Clarity and distinctness is thus a characteristic of my way of grasping or attending to ideas and not of the ideas themselves. But this is a continuity, not a discontinuity, in Descartes’ thought, for it is presaged already in the Regulae's account of intuitus as the easy and distinct, the not doubtful, grasp of a pure and attentive mind and in the Regulae's method of preparing the ingenium and its objects for this kind of grasping.^[27]

What intellect is, then, is the passive power of noting the ideas and distinctions prepared by the will. It is not an optional capacity of soul, for without it the soul would be pure, blind will. But it is not an end in itself. It is there in order to provide certain landmarks that might allow the will to guide itself well. Its nobility is that it allows the soul to recognize the limits prescribed to the soul by nature, that is, by God's ordination of the universe and by the eternal truths that he created innate to the soul. Intellect allows the soul to discover itself so that its willings might guide it well rather than ill. Willing is therefore of the essence of the life of the soul and the human being; intellect is the essential servant.

G. WILL, IMAGINATION, AND THE ACTIVE LIFE

The central teachings of the Passions of the Soul have more to do with the passional, emotional life than with intellect and will. Perhaps as part of the anticipated doctrines of medicine and morals,^[28] it helps to explain the psy-

[27] Descartes in fact does not use the locution "clear and distinct" of ideas but of the grasp the mind has on ideas; thus the form is often adverbial rather than adjectival.

[28] Mentioned in the preface to the French edition of the Principles as part of the tree of philosophy: the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches are all the other sciences reduced to three principal ones, medicine, mechanics, and morals (AT IXB 14).

chophysical character of most passions and gives instruction in how to keep them within bounds, with the ultimate goal of living a good life. The concluding article of the whole work puts it as follows.

Article 212. That it is on these [= the passions] alone that all the good and evil of this life depends.
For the rest, the soul can have pleasures on its own; but for those that are common to it and the body, they depend entirely on the Passions, in a manner such that men whom they can move the most are most capable of enjoying the sweetness of this life. It is true that they can also find here the greatest bitterness, when they do not know how to employ them well, and when fortune is against them. But Wisdom is principally useful on this point, that it teaches one so to make oneself master of them and to manage them with such skill that the evils they cause are quite supportable, and even that one draws joy from them all. (AT XI 488)

At the end of each of the three books that make up the Passions, there is at least a brief reflection on the role of the imagination and of images within the passional life. At the end of part l, in Article 50, Descartes emphasizes that although there seems to be a link established by nature between every motion of the pineal gland and the corresponding thoughts— and, in particular, between the passions we experience and the motions of gland, spirits, and brain that represent objects, chiefly as images—it is possible to change these links through habit and training, even through a single event, such as a foul taste in a dish we ordinarily love that puts us off that food forever.

At the end of part 2, which treats the number and order of the passions, there is in the penultimate article (no. 147) an example contrasting the internal emotions of the soul, which are not inherently attended by movements of the animal spirits, with the passions proper, which depend on these movements. A man who has lost his wife may be torn by a sadness aroused by the funeral display and his wife's absence, "and it can happen that some remnants of love or of pity, which present themselves to his imagination, draw veritable tears from his eyes, notwithstanding that he nevertheless feels a secret Joy in the deepest part of his soul; the emotion of which has so much power that the Sadness and the tears that accompany it can do nothing to diminish its force" (AT XI 441). Again, reading adventure stories can stimulate just about any passion, "according to the diversity of the objects that offer themselves to our imagination," passions that are nevertheless usually accompanied by a pure intellectual joy at feeling them.

In Article 211, the penultimate section of the concluding part 3, Descartes offers what he calls the most general remedy, "the easiest to pracrice," against the excesses of passion or their sometimes overwhelming

character.^[29] For example, some people are not able to keep from laughing when tickled, "although they do not take any pleasure in it. For the impression of Joy and surprise that has otherwise made them laugh for the same reason, being awakened in their phantasy, causes their lung to be suddenly inflated despite themselves" by the effects of the surrounding blood. And similarly for those who are disposed to feel certain passions strongly: they can scarcely control the physiological reaction "when their phantasy is strongly touched by the object of one of these Passions" (AT XI 486). The general remedy begins with the consideration that "when one feels the blood moved in this way one must take heed and remember that everything that presents itself to the imagination tends to deceive the soul and to make reasons appear to it that serve to make the object of its Passion much stronger than they are and those that serve to dissuade the soul much weaker." If the passion is inclining us to pursue immediately something that allows delay, we must refrain from judgment and distract ourselves with other thoughts until the emotion in the blood has abated. If the passion is inducing us to hesitate about something that requires an immediate decision, the will must consider and follow reasons contrary to the passion. As examples Descartes mentions two cases. When we are under attack we do not have time to deliberate, but those accustomed to reflect on their actions can usually manage to act swiftly enough. If they are struck by fear, "they will try to turn their thought from the consideration of the danger in representing to themselves the reasons why there is much more security and more honor in resistance than in flight." If, on the contrary, they feel a desire for vengeance because of excessive anger, "they will remember to think that it is imprudent to lose their life when one can save oneself without dishonor; and that if the contest is very unequal it is better to make an honest retreat or to ask for quarter than to expose oneself brutishly to a certain death."

At first glance the counsel of Article 211 suggests that imagination is the problem rather than the cure, that in general one must seek to counterbalance passions produced by various images by calling to mind rational maxims of good and bad behavior. Against this one could pit an inference it is possible to draw from the discussion in part l, Article 50, of the association and reassociation of sensory images: imagination can be used to retrain or rehabituate the passions. So, for example, a phobia of heights could be remedied not just by putting an individual in secure situations at progressively greater heights and removing safeguards one by one, but

[29] This is in addition to the specific remedies that derive from the psychophysical nature of each passion considered individually and to the possibility of altering the associations of gland movements and thoughts already described.

also by having the acrophobe imagine appropriate situations and recall past experiences so that he or she might recognize that they were not as dangerous as they seemed.

Moreover, one must be careful of reading too much into Descartes’ statement in Article 211 that "everything that presents itself to the imagination tends to deceive the soul." This does not imply that all images always deceive but rather, and quite in line with what the Meditations taught, that from our early childhood we tend to credit images and sensations with a greater cognitive value than they prove to have on closer examination. Pithy maxims do not operate on the level of "cogito, ergo sum," which is as much as possible abstracted from the particulars of sense and imagination, but rather set a different context for how the objects presented to imagination affect our psychophysical being.

As usual, a letter to Princess Elizabeth makes things clearer while qualifying the published works. In a letter of May or June 1645, Descartes points out how a person who has every reason to be content might nevertheless, by immersing himself in tragic dramas that he knows to be fictions, undergo physiological changes that would produce physical and psychological maladies. By contrast, a person who has every reason to feel displeasures but "who studies with great care to turn his imagination from them" and regards only objects tending to bring contentment and joy would learn to be dispassionate in judging his misfortunes and would even be restored to health by the physiological changes associated with those images (AT IV 219).

Imagination used well can thus give one control over one's moods, one's dispositions, even one's health—that is, over the realm of the substantial union of body and soul. In particular, imagination in the active sense is what enables us to delimit and control passive imagination. When Descartes defines passions of the soul in the narrowest sense of the term, he calls them imaginings. Article 27 says that passions in this sense are "perceptions, or sentiments, or emotions of the soul, which one refers to it [= the soul] particularly, and which are caused, maintained, and strengthened by some movement of the [animal] spirits" (AT XI 349). Article 26 calls these imaginings, imaginings that are dependent only on the fortuitous movement of the spirits, as opposed to those image perceptions that are dependent on the nerves, like sensations; fortuitous movements of spirits are also able to represent to the soul all the things that are represented through the nerves (AT XI 348), for example in dreams and reveries. Article 21 precedes these refinements of meaning with the bold assertion that the passions are imaginings that do not depend on the will (AT XI 344). That is, there are imaginings, producing new images, that come from acts of the will and that properly speaking are among the actions of the soul; then

there are imaginings that are the result of things presented to the sense (e.g., through the tragedies and comedies that depress or lift one psycho-physiologically); and finally the imaginings due to fortuitous movements of the pineal gland/animal spirit/nerve system, which are directly caused neither by the senses nor by the will.

I shall not tarry longer with this psychophysiological theory but only emphasize that the human being thus conceived is mentally active precisely as a willing being. This activity is exhibited in three mental "places": (A) in the soul alone (e.g., willing to love God); (B) in the realm of pure extension (e.g., imagining geometric figures); and (C) in the embodied soul (e.g., conceiving and imagining everyday plans and purposes). But each of these willing activities has a passive side: (a) intellection in the soul by itself; (b) the contemplation of the formed images of pure extension; and (c) the perception of what is stimulated by the traces in the pineal gland. The passions proper to the Passions of the Soul are of kind (c); they concern those things having a physiological cause (thus they are not formed by direct action of the will) that is perceived in the form of imaginings, sometimes clearly, sometimes obscurely; they range from the most realistic of dreams to the vaguest feelings of unease. Thus the Passions is chiefly about the human being as a passively imagining one, and as a willing being who can use willed reason and willed images to counterbalance the effects of the passive imaginings.

In the sixfold division of the human actions and passions noted above, will dominates the active side; it exists as purely spiritual (A) or is expressed as imagination in the thought of pure extension (B) and in the mental actions of everyday life (C). But on the passive side, we cannot say that intellect or perception dominates, since they are receptive toward the will, the active imagination, and various states of the body. Once again, the human being as conceived in the mature philosophy of Descartes is less decisively rational or intellectual than is commonly thought. Understanding how and why Descartes articulated the human being in this way requires recognizing the degree to which all his philosophizing was a prolonged meditation on fundamental psychology, with always a pervasive though sometimes mysterious role for imagination.

As at the conclusion of the previous chapter, it is illuminating to consider the issue from the perspective of the doctrine that human beings are made in God's image and likeness. The mathematical imagination described in Le Monde, guided by rules discoverable only to intellect, allowed human beings to replicate or mimick God's creation of the physical universe. The doctrine expressed in the Passions allows us to conceive a deeper sense in which the human being is made in the image of God. The 15 April 1630 letter to Mersenne had argued that in God will, understanding,

and creation are the same. This is not true or possible for any other, created being, in particular not for the finite human being, who at the very minimum is limited by God's being and the fact that <UL>God</UL> created the universe as it is and not otherwise. We cannot contravene the eternal truths; our ability to sense, imagine, and think is delimited by the nature (and the innate ideas) God has implanted in us. Moreover, unlike God and angels, we are aware creatures substantially united to matter, the fact of which union is impressed on us every day but which in its fundamental how and why is nearly unintelligible.

Nevertheless, God's infinity and perfection are reflected in the human will, which is perfect in its kind and unlimited. Although what we see clearly and distinctly we almost inevitably follow, we retain a power of holding in abeyance our assent to these things—and this is in fact the ontological-psychological source of the power of doubt. Insofar as God's will and knowledge are one and insofar as (according to the Passions ) every human willing (action) is associated with a perception by intellect (passion or reception)—leaving aside for the moment those perceptions that are nonvolitional, like sensations, hallucinations, and many emotions—the correspondence of action and passion in will and intellect constitutes a functional identity between volition and intellection that imitates the radical unity of will and intellect in God. But even more, our ability to replicate the physical world in imagination presented by Le Monde, our capacity to direct and modify our sensations, our imaginings, and our feelings in the psychophysiological realm, and our capability of doing these things consciously, with knowledge, all make us an image and likeness, as far as it is granted to human beings, of the power of God that overflows creatively into the reality of that Otherness called the universe.

In this sense Descartes provides a rationale for the unity of the theoretical and practical lives that eluded most of his Christian and ancient Greek predecessors, who contrasted the perfect life of contemplation to what was only second-best, often a very distant second-best: the practical, political, productive, earthly life. Descartes recognizes the power of intellect and the pleasures of contemplation, but, given the union of soul and body and the disproportion between will and intellect, the contemplation of truth cannot long detain the restlessness of the human soul, of human ingenium. When all is said and done, the image and likeness of God resembles the Creator more in will than in intellect. Will is not only the active obverse of the passive reverse intellection, it also has through phantasia or the pineal gland system an imaginative purchase on the created world that enables it to live there and even to conceive and make what has never before been realized in it. Our destiny as we know it naturally is above all to will well and rightly, which requires acknowledging both our own nature

implanted by God and the particularities of our situation. Knowing is therefore necessary and needs to be cultivated. But our being is not reducible to an operation of knowing, and we strive to perfect knowing not as an end in itself but because we will to live wisely. We increase our knowing so that we might live better, that is, so that our will might learn to guide itself in enjoying all the goods God has granted in the life of mind, of body, and of mind-body.