1

[First published in Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996): 30-76, this essay had a long pre-history. An early outline
of its arguments was presented in a paper delivered to the research seminar of the School of English and
American Studies at the University of Sussex in November, 1975; subsequent developments appeared in the
final chapter of my doctoral thesis (This Fatal Mirror: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the Legend and the
Context [University of Sussex, 1980]), and in a conference paper, 'The Order of Discovery': Descartes,
Faustus, and the Place of Literature in the Teaching of Philosophy, 14th Atlantic Philosophical Association
Conference, Universit Sainte-Anne (4-6 November 1983).]

[Index: Ren Descartes, Marin Mersenne, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Herrmes

Trismegistus, Jean Calvin, Jacques Derrida]
[Date: 1996]

The Dreamer's Path:

Descartes and the Sixteenth Century

Michael H. Keefer

[Descartes] ne croioit pas qu'on dt s'tonner si fort de voir que les

Potes, mme ceux qui ne font que niaiser, fussent pleins de sentences
plus graves, plus senses, & mieux exprimes que celles qui se trouvent
dans les crits des Philosophes. Il attribuoit cette merveille la divinit
de l'Enthousiasme, & la force de l'Imagination. . . .
Adrien Baillet, Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (1691),
paraphrasing Descartes' Olympica manuscript of 1619-1620
(Descartes, 1974, 10: 184)1
Methode ist Umweg.

In quoting from Renaissance and seventeenth-century sources, I have modernized

u/v and i/j, but have not altered spellings in any other way.
1

2
Walter Benjamin, Epistemo-Critical Prologue, The Origin of
German Tragic Drama (Benjamin, 1985, 21, 28)

Jacques Derrida begins a recent reflection upon Descartes' Discours de la mthode

by remarking upon the metaphor of the path, the way or road contained within the
etymology of the word 'method': methodos, metahodos, c'est--dire 'suivant la route',
suivant le chemin, en suivant le chemin, en chemin. Implicit in this metaphor, as also in
any concept of method, he finds a certain historicity: There can be no method without,
necessarily, an advance (cheminement)..., or proceeding (dmarche); ... without a flow
(cours), a sequel, a sequence: so many things which also form the structure of any history
(Derrida, 1983, 36 [my translation]). If method and history (including the sense of history
as narrative) thus meet and overlap in the metaphor of the road or wayhodos in Greek,
and in Latin via, iterso too, Derrida suggests, they share a certain iterability. History,
though it may be the domain of the singular event, is only constituted as history through
iteration and reiteration. Method, on the other hand, which consists precisely of the rules
of transposition that ensure iterability and repetition, annuls a certain historicity of the
singular event.
The relation between history and method is thus, he proposes, a paradoxical one
and this paradox is displayed in an especially provoking form in the singular historical
event constituted by Descartes' autobiographical discourse on method, a story told in a
historically determined language which at the same time sets out to provide the
foundations for a rational and universally valid system of precepts, maxims and laws.
Derrida finds that the etymology of the word 'discourse' compounds the paradox.
Discurrere, meaning to run about, to make an excursion, and also to digress, later came to
signify, in addition, to follow an itinerary in speech. Discursivity is thus in effect itinerant

3
speech, and the notion of a discourse on method acquires an element of redundancy
through the traces in both its terms of the same hodos, cursus, path or itinerary (Derrida,
1983, 37-40).
After commenting on Parmenides' Poem of the hodos as an inaugural discourse of
the path which resists incorporation either into a Platonic reflection on method or an
Aristotelian system of rhetoric, and on Heidegger's view of the Wegcharakter des Denkens
as a second instance of a discursive itinerary which exceeds the delimitations of direction,
rules, or method, Derrida concludes by remarking on the doubleness, the duplicity of
methodos and its cognates in Greek (in some contexts the word means artifice, fraud or
perversionvoie dtourne, meta hodos), and by observing how insistently roads and
pathsdiverses voies, le droit cheminrecur in Descartes' Discourse on Method
(Derrida, 1983, 41-51).
Given Derrida's insistent blurring in this essay of method and history, of rationality
and rhetorical sequentiality; given also his express dissatisfaction with Heidegger's
attempts to ascribe to the Cartesian moment the origins of an ideology of method
(46),2 it may seem surprising that he does not take this occasion to reinsert the Cartesian
discourse on method into history, to recognize it as a re-direction and extension of
discursive itineraries that had perhaps been well-travelled by Descartes' immediate
predecessors.
Rather than reproaching him for this omission, I would like here to explore a small
stretch of this 'road not taken.' I will not be concerned with what is, for rhetoricians at
least, the most familiar immediately pre-Cartesian 'method,' the dichotomizing dialectic of
Peter Ramus and its anticipations in such earlier writers as Rudolf Agricola and Jacques

Derrida remarks that there is always a moment in [Heidegger's] analysis when,

more or less furtively, discretely, he discloses before Descartesnotably in Plato
rather than in Aristotle, but in the Greeks at any rate, the beginnings of this
Verstellung, this disfiguration (46). Derrida would of course object to the notion that
any secure point of origin can ever be identified.
2

4
Lefvre d'taples.3 Descartes was conspicuously not interested in static, spatial schemata
of this kind, preferring instead to elaborate a method which, though aimed at the discovery
of operative eternal truths, was itself conceived of in temporal terms, as a discursive path,
a narrative. Nor do I intend to comment on Descartes' indebtedness to another more
obviously scientific method, the metodo risolutivo and metodo compositivo developed by
Galileo out of the analytic and synthetic logic of Giacomo Zabarella and the other Paduan
Aristotelians (see Randall, 1968, 222-51, and Randall, 1962-70, 1: 339-60).4
My own method in this essay, following the dictum of Walter Benjamin
Methode ist Umwegwill at times be deliberately digressive. However, my
deviations from some of the standard paths of critical exegesis are undertaken with the aim
of bringing to light certain continuities between Descartes' own narratives and earlier
discursive paths. I want to argue that two of these, Renaissance Hermetism and its nearopposite, Calvinist theology, are of large (and largely unrecognized) importance in
Descartes' development of his own distinctive path.
tienne Gilson's demonstration that Descartes' philosophical vocabulary is
affiliated to the scholastic traditions of the via antiqua and the via moderna has not
prevented more recent commentators from continuing to understand Descartes as the fons
et origo of a specifically modern mode of philosophizing. My intention here is less to
disrupt than to complicate this perception. I do not wish to challenge Descartes'
On Ramus and Agricola see Ong. Ramus was no doubt familiar with Lefvre's
Introductio in Ethicen Aristotelis (Paris, 1525), which begins (sig. a.ij r-v) with a table
of dichotomized virtues and vices, states of mind etc., each of which is then treated
in three sections: a definition, a sequence of quaestiones, and answers to these
(elementa).
4 In addition to a directly methodological indebtedness, one might suggest that
Descartes would have found resonances with the 1619 experience discussed in this
essay in a passage like the following, from Galileo's The Assayer (1623): that
[philosopher] will indeed be fortunate who, led by some unusual inner light, can turn
from dark and confused labyrinths in which he might have gone perpetually winding
with the crowd . . . (Galileo 240). The thinking of Zabarella may also have reached
Descartes through other channels: see for example Alister McGrath's suggestive
remarks on the influence of Zabarella on Thodore de Bze's systematizing of
Calvin's theology (McGrath 191-95).
3

5
originality, much less to suggest that he was passively 'influenced' by two currents of
sixteenth-century thought which, though both obsessively concerned with a recovery of
origins, differ from one another in doctrinal terms as much as from his own project of
returning to first principles. I am interested rather in considering the possibility that
Descartes' originary rationalism may have been marked, in no merely superficial manner,
by tendencies of a quite different order which were implicated in its primal gestures of
constitution and exclusion.
Descartes was, if anything, reacting against Renaissance modes of speculation (in
this sense he belongs to what has been called the anti-Renaissance). However, he was
also re-using them, though very selectively. His path remains, by this analysis, original; but
it seems to have begun, in a characteristically Renaissance manner, with a return ad fontes
in one case to Hermetic sources which owed their prestige to the belief that they
antedated the Greek philosophers, and were as ancient as any of the Hebrew scriptures;
and in another to theological writings which, in their analytical and exegetical rigor, were
professedly a return to the uncorrupted teachings of the early Church.

II

Where better to begin than with the first appearance in Descartes' writings of the
path, the hodos or iter that so interests Jacques Derrida? The text in question, a mere
jotting preserved in the notes which Leibniz made in 1676 from Descartes' manuscript
remains, could hardly be simpler:
Somnium 1619 nov., in quo carmen 7 cujus initium:
Quod vitae sectabor iter? . . .
1974, 10: 216).

Auson[ius] (Descartes,

6
(The dream of November 1619, and in it the seventh poem of
Ausonius which begins: 'What path in life shall I follow?)
Though simple, this jotting is of enormous importfor according to Descartes'
first biographer, Adrien Baillet, the dream (or rather dreams) referred to here coincided
with what Descartes himself in his Discourse on Method said was the first enunciation of
his philosophical method, and hence the starting point of his path as an independent
thinker. But this brief text is at the same time elusive. Henri Gouhier took it to represent
an inaugural momentthe moment at which, having woken from his dreams, the young
Descartes began the process of retrospectively reconstructing them as a legitimation of his
philosophical project.5 However, it seems no less probable that these words are Leibniz's
rather than Descartes'that they amount to a reading note, rather than a transcription
from that petit registre en parchemin which was found among Descartes' papers after his
death, and which at some time in the eighteenth century was lost or destroyed. But
whatever the authorship of this text, another sentence of Leibniz'sthis time definitely in
his own wordsconfirms Baillet's view of the importance of the dream or dreams:
Descartes for a long time devoted himself to studies at the Jesuit
college of La Flche, and as a young man formed the plan of
emending philosophy after some dreams, and long meditation on that

Ascribing this text to Descartes' Experimenta manuscript, Gouhier identifies it as

the experiential basis of the dream-narrative in the Olympica manuscript, according
to which Descartes awoke for the third and final time while meditating on the poem
of Ausonius beginning Quod vitae sectabor iter? Gouhier argues that the further
removed in time anything in the narrative is from this waking moment, the more
completely it is a retrospective reconstruction rather than an account of any actual
dream-experience (Gouhier, 32-41). Resting as it does upon the assumption that the
words in question are Descartes' rather than Leibniz's, this argument scarcely
justifies Gouhier's reference in inverted commas to les 'songes' de Descartes.
Even if the words are Descartes', it is not evident to me why one part of an
autobiographical text should be privileged as being somehow less a retrospective
reconstruction than all the rest of it.
5

7
passage of Ausonius: What path in life shall I follow? (Leibniz, 4:
311, qtd. from Browne, 265)6
Moreover, Descartes' own account of this episode is preserved, though in distorted form,
in Baillet's paraphrase of his lost Olympica manuscript.
In what sense, then, is it significant that the question remembered in these brief
annotationsQuod vitae sectabor iter?and remembered, it would seem, as a
metonymy for the whole of Descartes' annunciatory experience of the night of November
10-11, 1619, came to him not as part of a methodical sequence of thought, but in a dreamrevelation, one which he received (to cite his own words, quoted by Baillet) cm plenus
forem Enthousiasmoin a state, that is, of divine exaltation, inspiration, or possession?
(Descartes, 1974, 10: 179).7 And what should we make of the fact that the choice of paths
presented itself, at the moment which Descartes then and subsequently understood as the
inauguration of his own hodos and his own method, in the form of a citation from the poet
Ausonius, and thus as something already iterated and reiterated?
Let us consider these dreams. Adrien Baillet's Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (1691),
which paraphrases extensively from the manuscripts to which the biographer had access,
reveals that Descartes' philosophizing in his famous pole in the winter of 1619 was,
initially at least, a different process from that orderly sequence of thoughts recounted in
the Discourse on Method. This process appears to have culminated in three dreams on the
night of November 10th, 1619, in the course of which Descartes was crippled by ghosts,
whirled about by a sudden wind, pushed by an evil spiritthis same windtowards (of all
Leibniz's Latin original: Cartesius diu Flexiae in collegio Jesuitarum studiis operam
dedit, juvenisque emendandae Philosophiae consilium cepit post somnia quaedam
et illud Ausonii diu expensum: quod vitae sectabor iter?
7 'Enthusiasm here carries a sense close to that of 'divine inzpirtion.' See Henry
More, Enthusiasmus triumphatis, sect. II (More, 1: sig.s4v). My quotations in English
from Descartes' writings are, where possible, based upon the translation of Haldane
and Ross (Descartes, 1973)--although in places where this translaton seems to me
inaccurate, I have not hesitated to modify it. Page references are in most cases
given to the Latin and/or French texts in the editions of Adam and Tannery
(Descartes, 1974) or of Alqui (Descartes, 1963-73).
6

8
places) a church, advised that an unnamed person wished to give him a melon, frightened
by thunder, and finally engaged by another unknown person in conversation over a
Dictionary, which signified nothing other than all the sciences brought together, and an
anthology of Latin verse, by which Descartes understood Philosophy and Wisdom joined
together (Descartes, 1974, 10: 181-84).
For what it may be worth, we have Descartes' word that his meditations in 1619
were bound up with an exercise of deliberate doubt. In Part Two of the Discourse he says
of this aspect of his meditations in the pole that as regards all the opinions which up to
this time I had embraced, I thought I could not do better than endeavour once for all to
sweep them completely away, so that they might later on be replaced, either by others
which were better, or by the same, when I had made them conform to the uniformity of a
rational scheme (Descartes, 1973, 1: 89; cf. Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 581). If Baillet's Vie
de Monsieur Des-Cartes can be trusted, this was a painful experience: he had no less to
suffer than if it had been a matter of stripping away his very self. And according to
Baillet, this self-imposed torment, this attempt to represent his mind to himself entirely
naked, led directly to the night of dreams. Descartes' efforts threw his mind into violent
agitation.... He tired it to such a degree that his brain became overheated, and he fell into a
kind of enthusiasm which so worked upon his already exhausted mind that he prepared it
to receive the impressions of dreams and visions (Descartes, 1974, 10: 180-81). 8 The
dreams thus seem not to have been an accidental by-product of this process, but rather its
Baillet's French: .... il n'eut pas moins souffrir, que s'il et t question de se
dpouiller de soy-mme. Il crt pourtant en tre venu bout. Et dire vrai, c'toit
assez que son imagination lui prsentt son esprit tout nud, pour lui faire croire qu'il
l'avoit mis effectivement dans ct tat. Il ne lui restoit que l'amour de la Vrit.... Ce
fut la matire unique des tourmens qu'il fit souffrir son esprit pour lors.... La
recherche qu'il voulut faire de ces moiens, jetta son esprit dans de violentes
agitations.... Il le fatigua de telle sorte, que le feu lui prt au cerveau, & qu'il tomba
dans une espce d'enthousiasme, qui disposa de telle manire son esprit dj
abatu, qu'il le mit en tat de recevoir les impressions des songes & des visions.
Baillet does not indicate any textual source for these statements. For a discussion of
the problems raised by the fact that Descartes' Olympica survives only in a few
fragments, and in Baillet's paraphrase and commentary, see Moyal.
8

9
desired consummation. Indeed, Baillet attributes to Descartes' Olympica manuscript the
statements that the Genius which excited in him the enthusiasm by which he had felt his
brain heated for some days had predicted these dreams to him before he went to bed, and
that the human mind had no part in them (Descartes, 1974, 10: 186). 9
What path can be traced in these dreams? In the first of them, Descartes was
terrified by the apparition of quelques fantmes, and thinking he was walking in the
streets, he felt himself to be struck by such a weakness on his right side that he could not
maintain himself upright, and had to lean to his left side in order to be able to get to the
place where he wanted to go.... Ashamed of this posture, he tried to straighten himself,
but a sudden swirling gust of wind spun him around three or four times on his left foot.
Hardly able to stand, he noticed a school in front of himone is reminded of the Jesuit
college of La Flche where he was educatedand entered it to find a refuge, and a
remedy for his disorder: he hoped to reach the school church and to pray there
(Descartes, 1974, 10: 181).
The structure of the dream seems clear up to this point. It is the right side of
Descartes' body image that is struck with weakness. If one can apply to the imagery of this
dream some of the conventional associations of 'left' and 'right,' then the phantoms, the
sinister wind and the weakness of Descartes' right side would together represent
opposition, both internal and 'demonic,' to his conscious project of ridding himself of his
former opinions, of stripping his mind naked. The most conspicuous clothing of the mind
(to fill out the Neoplatonic metaphor) is the body; one might say that through the
humiliating terrors of this dream the demonic body is fighting back. And in so doing it
deflects the dreamer from his initial path, meta hodos: almost from the first moment of his
dream, then, he is following a voie dtourne.

Baillet's French: Il ajoute que le Gnie qui excitoit en luy l'enthousiasme dont il se
sentoit le cerveau chauff depuis quelques jours, luy avoit prdit ces songes avant
que se mettre au lit, & que l'esprit humain n'y avoit aucune part.
9

10
Having decided to enter the church, the dreaming Descartes would seem, rather
curiously, to have begun to find reasons for not doing so. Realizing that he had passed a
man whom he knew without saluting him, he attempted to turn back, but was violently
rebuffed by the wind. At the same time, though, he noticed another person, who called him
politely by name, and informed him that a certain gentleman had something to give him
the famous melon. As a group of other people formed around him, Descartes, still hunched
over, observed that they stood upright and firm on their feet, and also that the wind was
greatly diminished in force. At this point he awokewithout having entered the church,
one may remark.
The path marked out by this first dream is a paradoxical one. Descartes at its
beginning had a goal, the place where he wanted to go; but crippled by the ghosts, and
spun about by the wind, he directed his steps instead to a church as a place of refuge, only
to find that the wind which had previously obstructed him was now pushing him in that
direction, while at the same time blowing against the church (le vent souffloit contre
l'Eglise). What seems really to have frightened DescartesBaillet's wording is
unfortunately imprecise at this point10was not so much his own disability, or the
humiliation of being spun around like a top, as the discovery that the wind which had
attacked him was furthering his decision to seek refuge in a church. His own pious will
was suddenly revealed to be in accord with the demonic force which was oppressing him.
One could hardly ask for a clearer dream image of psychic overdetermination. The issue
Baillet wrote as follows: Etant honteux de marcher de la sorte, il fit un effort pour
se redresser; mais il sentit un vent imptueux qui, l'emportant dans une espce de
tourbillon, lui fit faire trois ou quatre tours sur le pied gauche. Ce ne fut pas encore
ce qui l'pouvanta. La difficult qu'il avoit de se traner, faisoit qu'il croioit tomber
chaque pas, jusqu' ce qu'ayant apperu un collge ouvert sur son chemin, il entra
dedans pour y trouver une retraite, & un remde son mal. Il tcha de gagner
l'Eglise du collge, o sa prmire pense toit d'aller faire sa prire; mais s'tant
apperu qu'il avoit pass un homme de sa connoissance sans le salur, il voulut
retourner sur ses pas pour lui faire civilit, & il fut repouss avec violence par le vent
qui souffloit contre l'Eglise. The dreamer's terror might have been inspired by the
fact that he found himself scarcely able to stagger along, but given that he was a
young man with philosophical ambitions, it was more probably prompted by the
paradox with which the episode of his turn towards the college church culminates.
10

11
raised is that of autonomy or free-will: if Descartes wills what the wind wills, then what is
his willor, more precisely, whose is it? The young Descartes has no answer to this
question: as he wrote in what Henri Gouhier believes to have been part of the Olympica
manuscript, God made three marvels: things from nothing, free-will, and the Man-God
(Descartes, 1974, 10: 218).11
Descartes' own interpretations of this first dream only heighten the sense of
paradox. On waking, he felt a real pain, which made him fear that this might have been
the work of some evil genius who wished to seduce him.... He prayed to God, asking to be
guarded from the evil effect of his dream.... But the process of interpretation which
continued after he awoke from his third and last dream complicated this identification of
the power at work in the first one. According to Baillet's paraphrase, The wind which
pushed him towards the college church when his right side was weakened was none other
than the evil Genius which was trying to throw him by force into a place where he was
planning to go voluntarily. In the margin Baillet quotes Descartes' own words: A malo
Spiritu ad Templum propellebar. He continues: This is why God did not permit him to
advance further and let himself be carried, even into a holy place, by a spirit whom He had
not sentalthough Descartes was convinced that it had been the Spirit of God who had
made him take his first steps towards this church (Descartes, 1974, 10: 182, 185-86). 12
The dreamer's behaviour is thus, in retrospect, doubly overdeterminedfirst by the
demonic forces represented in the dream, and then, simultaneously, by the God whom his
See Gouhier, 11-17, for an analysis of the relations between the Olympica
manuscript and the texts preserved in Leibniz's copy under the title Cogitationes
privatae.
12 Baillet's French: Il se rveilla..., & il sentit l'heure mme une douleur effective,
qui lui fit craindre que ce ne ft l'opration de quelque mauvais gnie qui l'auroit
voulu sduire. [. ] Le vent qui le poussoit vers l'Eglise du collge, lorsqu'il avoit
mal au cot droit, n'toit autre chose que le mauvais Gnie qui tchoit de le jetter
par force dans un lieu, u son dessein toit d'aller volontairement. C'est pourquoy
Dieu ne permit pas qu'il avant plus loin, & qu'il se laisst emporter, mme en un
lieu saint, par un Esprit qu'il n'avoit pas envoy: quoy qu'il ft trs-persuad que
c'et t l'Esprit de Dieu qui luy avoit fait faire les prmires dmarches vers cette
Eglise.
11

12
interpretation inscribes in it as the initial prompter and final preventer of his movement
towards the church, and thus as the unseen author of what had seemed to be Descartes'
own actions. One is left with a disturbing overlap between the (presumably good) Genius
who excited Descartes' state of enthusiasm and predicted his dreams to him, the evil spirit
or evil Genius who in the first of those dreams attempted to push him into a church, and
the God whom his interpretation summoned up to dispose of this paradox.
Baillet tells us that after dreaming his first dream, Descartes meditated for some
two hours. He then fell asleep again, but was awakened at once by a sound like a clap of
thunder, and opening his eyes, he saw many sparks of fire scattered about the room.
This second dream, which he initially found as terrifying as the first, he later understood to
be the signal of the Spirit of Truth which descended on him to possess him; the terror
which it inspired was the remorse of his conscience over the sins he might have
committed in the course of his life till then (Descartes, 1974, 10: 182, 186). 13
The third dream, while lacking the narrative shape of the first, condenses its vivid
imagery into a textual metonymy, and supplements this with what is quite clearly a
response to the project of Descartes' waking mind. In this dream, which he took to signify
his future, Descartes found two books upon his table, a dictionary and an anthology of
Latin poetry: it was in the latter of these that he found the poem of Ausonius beginning
Baillet's French: ... il crt entendre un bruit aigu & clatant, qu'il prit pour un
coup de tonnre. La frayeur qu'il en eut, le rveilla sur l'heure mme; et ayant
ouvert les yeux, il appert beaucoup d'tincelles de feu rpandes par la chambre.
[. ] L'pouvante dont il fut frapp dans le second songe, marquoit, son sens, sa
syndrse, c'est--dire, les remords de sa conscience touchant les pchez qu'il
pouvoit avoir commis pendant le cours de sa vie jusqu'alors. La foudre dont il
entendit l'clat, toit le signal de l'Esprit de Vrit qui descendoit sur luy pour le
possder. A connection between sparks and synderesis appears to be traditional.
Meister Eckhart wrote as follows about the parable in Luke 14: 16-17 of the man who
prepared a great feast and sent his servant to invite his friends: It seems to me that
this servant is the spark of the soul [daz vnkelin der sele], which is created by God
and inserted [into the soul] as a light from above. It is an image of divine nature,
contantly opposed to everything that is not of God. But it is not a power of the
soul.... It is called a synteresis, and that designates both a connection [with God]
and an aversion [from all that is not God]. It has two activities. The one is bitter
combat against every impurity. The other is constant attraction to what is good
(qtd. from Ozment, 7).
13

13
with the words Quod vitae sectabor iter? which he appears later to have remembered
as a metonymy for the whole dream-experience. Before he awoke, Descartes understood
the dictionary to mean nothing other than all the sciences brought together, while the
anthology indicated in particular, and in a distinct manner, Philosophy and Wisdom joined
together; upon waking, he was bold enough to persuade himself that it was the Spirit of
Truth who had wished to open the treasures of all the sciences to him by this dream
(Descartes, 1974, 10: 184-85).14

III

But in what manner were these dreams related to the path Descartes did in fact
follow, or to the philosophical method which is its most important textual residue? Baillet
interpreted Descartes' words X. Novembris 1619, cm plenus forem Enthousiasmo, &
mirabilis scientiae fundamenta reperirem &c. as meaning that on the day preceding the
night of dreams he had discovered, in a state of exaltation, the foundations of a marvellous
science. By this account, the dreams would seem not to have constituted his discovery, but
rather to have confirmed it, and perhaps expanded its implications.
The nature of the marvellous science remains to some extent a mystery. That it
was initially unclear to Descartes himself may be suggested by a marginal note which,
according to Baillet, he added to the Olympica manuscript: XI. Novembris 1620, coepi
intelligere fundamentum Inventi mirabilis (Descartes, 1974, 10: 179): November 11,

Baillet's French: Il jugea que le Dictionnaire ne vouloit dire autre chose que
toutes les Sciences ramasses ensemble; & que le Recueil de Posies, intitul
Corpus potarum, marquoit en particulier, & d'une manire plus distincte, la
Philosophie & la Sagesse jointes ensemble. [ ] Voyant que l'application de toutes
ces choses rssissoit si bien son gr, il fut assez hardi pour se persuader que
c'toit l'Esprit de Vrit qui avoit voulu lui ouvrir les trsors de toutes les sciences
par ce songe."
14

14
1620, I began to understand the foundations of the marvellous invention.15 This
marvellous science would seem to have included some of the ideas on method developed
in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind (written by 1628). The concept of a universal
wisdom to be attained through a recognition of the interrelatedness of all the sciences
(Rule 1) is clearly present in the dictionary and the anthology of the third dream. And the
evident parallel between Descartes' simple natures theory (Rules 6, 8, 12) and the
geometrical problems upon which he had been working in 1618 and early 1619 suggests
that he had struck upon the idea of generalizing that mathematical logic, which he
described to Isaac Beeckman in March 1619 as a fundamentally new science, and also as
an incredibly ambitious project (Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 37-39), into a universal method
of inquiry. More important, from my point of view, is the strong probability that the
meditations which culminated in the dreams of 1619 embodied a process of deliberate
doubt that was aimed at establishing an unshakeable knowledge of the naked
understandingupon which the knowledge of all things else depends (Rules for the
Direction of the Mind, Rule 8; Descartes, 1973, 1: 24-25).
Almost a decade after the annunciatory experience of his dreams, Descartes
returned to this use of doubt in a more rigorous manner: in Part III of the Discourse he
dates to the years 1628-29 his formulation of the arguments which led him through a
systematic doubt of everything that could be doubted to the Archimedean point of I think,
therefore I am, and from thence to a reconstruction of philosophy (Descartes, 1973, 1:
100).16 His letters, as R. H. Popkin has noted, also indicate that around 1628-29 he was
Jacques Maritain followed G. Milhaud in rejecting Baillet's interpretation of the
mirabilis scientia and proposing that the plenitude of enthusiasm, the dream and
the discovery are but one and the same event (Maritain, 189n.). Most interpreters,
however, associate the mirabilis scientia with the method, and regard the dreams as
an authentication of meditations which preceded them. See, for example, Schuster,
83-84 n. 32, 87 n. 64.
16 Descartes' allusion to Archimedes occurs at the beginning of the Second
Meditation (Descartes, 1973, 1: 149). The Regulae or Rules presumably antedate the
precise formulation of these arguments; they show, nonetheless, that he had
already worked out some of their elements. Consider his first example of an
intellectual intuition: ... each individual can mentally have intuition of the fact that
15

15
struck by the full force of the sceptical onslaught [that is, of the contemporary revival of
Pyrrhonism], and the need for a new and stronger answer to it (Popkin, 174).
There are clear differences between the doubt of 1619 and that of 1628-29. The
latter formed part of a sophisticated argument, while the former, though in some sense
methodical, and evidently expected to produce a guarantee of reliable knowledge, appears
not to have been integrated into any systematic philosophical construction. Moreover,
while the doubt of 1628-29 could be described as abstract and theoretical, that of 1619, as
the dreams attest, was inextricably linked to the path of Descartes' own life. But despite
these differences, Descartes seems to have seen a close connection between his
meditations in the pole and the argument he constructed almost a decade later. In Part
II of the Discourse (which also contains a masked allusion to the dreams of 1619), 17 the
description of his doubting in 1619 is closely followed by the enunciation of the four
elementary rules of his method, the first of which proposes a criterion of clarity and
distinctness as the basis for determining which judgements may be accepted as indubitable.
The use of this criterion is thus made a part of the 1619 meditationseven though its
philosophical basis is established only in Part IV in the argument which follows from the
systematic doubt of 1628-29.
A more conclusive link between the experience of 1619 and the argument of 162829 can be found in the unfinished dialogue La recherche de la vrit par la lumire
naturelle, in which Descartes' spokesman responds to objections against the systematic
doubt which he is proposing with the assurance that
he exists, and that he thinks (Rule 3; Descartes, 1973, 1: 7). In Rule 12 he writes
that If Socrates says he doubts everything, it follows necessarily that he knows this
at leastthat he doubts; and he presents the following propositions as necessary
rather than contingent: 'I exist, therefore God exists' 'I know, therefore I have a
mind distinct from my body' (Descartes, 1973, 1: 43).
17 Descartes writes: But, like a man who walks alone and in darkness, I resolved to
go so slowly, and to use so much circumspection in all things, that even if I
advanced only very little, I would at least take care not to fall (Descartes, 1963-73,
1: 584). As Georges Poulet observed, toute cette seconde partie du Discours est,
sans que Descartes y fit formellement mention du songe, remplie de l'exprience
mme que le songe lui communiqua (Poulet 24).

16
these doubts which alarmed you to begin with, are like phantoms and
vain images which appear at night in the uncertain glimmer of a
feeble light. If you flee from them, your fear will follow you, but if
you approach as though to touch them, you will discover them to be
no more than air and shadow, and will in the future feel more
confident in any such encounter. (Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 1121)18
This is, unmistakably, an echo of the first of Descartes' three dreams: he was frightened by
phantoms, and crippled by a demonic wind; but he resisted, and after the thunderbolt of his
second dream and the revelation of the third, could look back on these terrors without
fear. Perhaps more importantly, this passage provides a link between the evil genius of
Descartes' first dream and that other evil genius who constitutes the final, 'hyperbolic' form
of Cartesian doubt in the Meditations of 1641: the phantoms, who in the dream of 1619
were clearly allied to the wind, here represent systematic doubt.
This linkage between the doubt and dream-experience of 1619, the argument
refuting scepticism which Descartes developed in 1628-29 and to which he gave literary
form in La recherche de la vrit and in the Discourse, and the Meditations in which he
cemented the metaphysical foundations of his new philosophy, draws our attention to the
banal fact that the arguments of systematic doubt are a threat to, and the Archimedean
point of cogito, ergo sum a proclamation of, human autonomy. The connection may also
serve as a reminder that what Cartesian philosophy identifies as its own primal scene
remained substantially unchanged between 1619 and the 1640s. The dream-walker of
1619, or the thinker of the Meditations who is willing to assume that his thoughts may be
a dream, encounters or hypothesizes an evil Genius who threatens to make him the
The French text: ... je vous avertis que ces doutes, qui vous ont fait peur
l'abord, sont comme des fantmes et vaines images, qui paraissent la nuit la
faveur d'une lumire dbile et incertaine: si vous les fuyez, votre crainte vous
suivra; mais si vous approchez comme pour les toucher, vous dcouvrirez que ce
n'est rien, que de l'air et de l'ombre, et en serez l'avenir plus assur en pareille
rencontre.
18

17
helpless object of its manipulations. In this sense the evil spirit of 1619 poses the more
radical threat, raising the unanswerable question of whether Descartes' decision to seek
refuge in a church was psychologically overdetermined; the power of the evil Genius in the
Second Meditation, in contrast, is restricted to the epistemic level by Descartes' insistence
that his own thoughts spring up of themselves in his mind, and are inspired by nothing
beyond his own nature (for the Latin and French versions of this passage, see Descartes,
1963-73, 2: 183, 417 respectively).
The dreamer escapes from this predicament through an act of resistancein the
first case by refusing to let the spirit push him into a church, and in the second by insisting,
let [the evil Genius] deceive me as much as he will, he can never cause me to be nothing
so long as I think I am something (Descartes, 1973, 1: 150; cf. Descartes, 1963-73, 2:
183, 415)an act which is then divinely authenticated. In 1619 Descartes subsequently
discovers in his resistance the agency of a benevolent God who wanted to reveal to him
the treasures of all the sciences; in 1641 he argues the existence of a similarly benevolent
God, who cannot be a deceiver (Descartes, 1973, 1: 150 [Meditation II], 1: 171
[Meditation III), and who thus provides him with the criterion of clarity and distinctness
that legitimizes his method of discovery.

IV

The very improbability, the extravagance of a path which, beginning in religious

enthusiasm and dreams, appears to lead without detour to the method of Cartesian
rationalism, will perhaps justify a degree of interpretive indirection on our part. The result
may be a kind of fable. But so also, by Descartes' own account, is the Discourse on
Methodwhich, in a well-known passage, modestly indicating that he does not insist that

18
others should adopt the paths he himself has followed, he likens to a history, or, if you
prefer it, a fable....
Three paragraphs later, speaking not of his own text but of the histories and fables
of the ancients, Descartes remarks that fables make one imagine many events possible
which in reality are not so, and even the most accurate of histories, if they do not exactly
misrepresent or exaggerate the value of things in order to render them more worthy of
being read, at least omit in them all the circumstances which are basest and least
notable.... He compares the reading of such texts, which he himself abandoned once his
schooling was finished, to travel in foreign lands, too much of which, he says, makes one
a stranger in one's own countrythis from a man who had spent more than half of the
preceding two decades outside his native France (Discourse, I; Descartes, 1973, 1: 83, 8485).
One notes with interest the inadvertent warning here, and also the implicit link
between Descartes' own history or fable and those of the ancients, which it seems to be
part of his purpose to supplant. Is there perhaps, in addition, some more intimate
connection between this autobiographical narrative and certain ancient fables (a word
which Descartes' text does not require us to understand in a narrowly literal sense)? In one
of the paragraphs which intervene between the passages I have quoted, he writes that la
gentillesse des fables rveille l'esprit: the grace of fables awakens the mind (Discours, I;
Descartes 1963-73, 1: 572). He is speaking here of the education of children. But it may
shortly come to appear that the connection between fables and intellectual awakening has
deeper resonances in the writings of this dreamer, this consummate story-teller.
Taking the word 'fable' in its widest sense, as applying not merely to a certain kind
of moralized or didactic narrative, but also more generally to discursive paths and
narratives of legitimation to which we grant at best a partial or conditional assent, let us
ask which of the 'fables' current in Descartes' early manhood could have provided him with

19
the materialsincluding the dream-revelation of November 1619for the construction of
his own history or fable, the Cartesian Bildungsroman.
The answer will not necessarily be a simple one. Writers of the period were almost
inescapably caught up in complex ideological, and often also physical, conflicts. Descartes
was himself serving as a volunteer with the Imperial army in the opening campaign of the
Thirty Years' War when he experienced his dream-revelation, and while in Germany he
experienced some of the excitement generated by the apocalyptic fantasies of those bizarre
offshoots of Lutheranism and Hermetic magic, the Rosicrucian manifestos (texts which, as
Frances Yates showed, there is good reason to connect with the political and ideological
tensions that led to war). 19 During his absence from France there occurred the Huguenot
revolt of 1621, one of the instigators of which, the tragic poet Antoine de Montchrestien,
was killed in a skirmish in Normandy that October (Griffiths, 14-18). And on Descartes'
return to Paris in 1623 he was himself briefly suspected of being one of the Rosicrucian
'invisibles,' over whose supposed arrival in the city to spread their 'atheistical' and magical
doctrines writers like the Jesuit Franois Garasse were trying to stir up alarm. For
Descartes this was a dangerous situation: in 1619 Giulio Cesare Vanini had been burned at
the stake in Toulouse for 'atheism,' and there seems to have been around this time an
epidemic of sorcerer-burnings in France, one of whose victims in 1623 was a man
executed at Moulins for the crime of possessing a copy of that sixteenth-century
encyclopaedia of magic, Cornelius Agrippa's De occulta philosophia.20 The climate, in
short, was an increasingly repressive one.
The books written by Franois Garasse and by Marin Mersenne in the early 1620s
are of interest as showing with some clarity what it was that was being repressed. Garasse
makes clear at the outset of his loose-lipped attack upon the subversive currents of the age
See Descartes, 1974, 10: 193-200, 214; also Yates, 1975.
Vanini combined the Aristotelianism of Averroes and Pomponazzi with the
naturalistic philosophy of Cardano and Telesio. On the burnings of sorcerers at this
time, see Lenoble, 30 ff. For the man burned at Moulins, see Mersenne, 1932, 51 n3.
19
20

20
that he is primarily concerned with sceptical and libertine tendencies, with those beaux
esprits who set themselves up as opponents of the heavy yoke of superstition, but he
sees these tendencies as closely allied to an interest in le secret des causes naturelles, in
Neoplatonist mysticism, magic, the cabala, and alchemy (Garasse, 1: 2-4).21
Although, unlike Garasse, Mersenne was a serious scholar, his Quaestiones
celeberrimae in Genesim also attacks 'atheists' and deists like the unfortunate Vanini along
with magi like Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico, Cornelius Agrippa, and (most emphatically)
that Hermetic philosopher and avowed supporter of the Rosicrucians, Robert Fludd, who
had recently published an extended cabalistic interpretation of Genesisand whom
Mersenne calls a cacomagus, a haereticomagus," and (punning on his name) one
soon to be submerged in the eternal floods (Mersenne, 1932, 62). 22 It would be possible
for analytical purposes to distinguish between Mersenne's treatment of these tendencies,
but Robert Lenoble's conflation of the two as related aspects of Renaissance naturalism
is probably closer to Mersenne's own view of the matter (Lenoble, 5 ff.).
Having discharged himself of this counterblast against magical or naturalistic
appropriations of Christian doctrines, this summa against Renaissance magic, its whole
way of thinking, and all its offshoots in the vast contemporary dissemination of magical
practices (Yates, 1964, 434), Mersenne in the following year attacked the scepticism of
Pierre Charron, the 'Renaissance naturalism' of Jerome Cardan and the Hermetism of
Giordano Bruno in L'Impit des distes, athes, et libertins de ce temps (1624). The main
body of this work, however, is devoted to refuting a Deist poem, the mocking libertinism
of which Mersenne correctly understands as prompted less by these currents of thought
than by the harsh paradoxes of Calvinist theology. Mersenne argues against this
[L]e pesant ioug de la superstition is Garasse's own phrase. Two further books
by Garasse, published in 1624 and 1625, repeated and expanded his vituperations,
but also brought on a crushing counter-attack by the Jansenist theologian SaintCyran which resulted in the condemnation of Garasse's buffooneries by the
Sorbonne in 1626. See Popkin, 111-15.
22 The wording of Mersenne's pun on Fludd's name (the Latinized form of which was
De Fluctibus) is brevibus submergendum fluctibus aeternis.
21

21
anonymous Pote Calvino-diste (and also against Calvin) that God's will and his
foreknowledge are in no sense the cause of our sins, and that our actions do not follow
the absolute will of God Mersenne, 1624, 572). 23 Not surprisingly, his defence of God's
justice slides into the familiar equivocations that it was Calvin's purpose to confront and to
eliminate: arguing in one chapter that we can do nothing, for good or evil, without divine
aid, Mersenne maintains in the next that God's foreknowledge, his will, and also his laws
and all his works, are in no sense prejudicial to our liberty (Mersenne, 1624, 471-72,
477-78 [ch. xvii], 517 [ch. xviii]).24
In 1625 Mersenne published another fat book, La vrit des sciences, a dialogue
of some one thousand pages in which the opinions of an Alchemist, who believes his
science capable of renewing the whole world, and dispersing the shadows of ignorance by
some extraordinary new light (Mersenne, 1625, 3), 25 are demolished by a Sceptic, whose
tropes are in turn refuted by Mersenne himself in the person of the Christian Philosopher,
and supplanted by his own mitigated, constructive scepticism. But if the primary target of
this book is the current wave of Pyrrhonist scepticism, it also contains a reminder of
Mersenne's opposition to those magicians and charlatans known as Brothers of the Rosy
Cross, who boast of understanding [Hermes] Trismegistus and all the cabalists of
Antiquity... (Mersenne, 1625, 566-67).
Catholic orthodoxy, then, saw itself as threatened in the early 1620s by searchers
into the secrets of natural causes who, practising one or another form of Hermetic and
Cabalistic magic or alchemy, at the same time appropriated Christian doctrine for their
I have quoted from the title of Ch. xx: Auquel il est monstr que nos actions ne
suivent pas l'absolu vouloir de Dieu.... On p. 539 Mersenne writes, Pour moy je
croy que cet homme a est Calviniste...; on p. 580, after attacking the Calvinist
doctrine of predestination, he refers to him as ce Pote Calvino-diste.
24 Mersenne, 1624, 517 (ch. xviii): ... la volont de Dieu n'est point cause de nos
pechez, mais nous tous seuls: sa prescience, & sa volont, aussi bien que ses loix,
& toutes ses oeuvres ne prejudicient en rien nostre libert....
25 This is in fact the Sceptic's characterization of alchemy: On diroit vous ouyr
parler, que vostre Alchymie seroit capable de restaurer tout le monde, & faire
vanouyr les tenebres de l'ignorance par quelque clat extraordinaire....
23

22
own purposes; by deists and libertines, whose reaction against the hard doctrines of Jean
Calvin led them to scoff at all of the more punitive tenets of Christianity; and also,
increasingly, by Pyrrhonist sceptics, who threatened not so much the faith as its
appendages of rational theology and scholastic philosophy. Despite their obvious diversity,
these tendencies were not roped together arbitrarily by Garasse and Mersenne: they in fact
overlap in ways that have a direct bearing upon Descartes' meditations in November 1619.
That Descartes read Montaigne is well known. In the next section of this essay I
wish to show that there is reason to believe that he was also acquainted with a tradition of
sixteenth-century occultism to which Montaigne's scepticism is in certain respects
connected. And in the concluding three sections I will propose that Descartes' thought
took shape as an itinerary across a discursive field structured not only by the scholastic
texts to which modern Cartesian scholarship has so insistently drawn attention, but also
(and decisively) by two diametrically opposed groups of texts: the 'philosophical' writings
attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, and the theological writings of Jean Calvin.

Montaigne and his successors argued that all human opinions are doubtful, and that
consequently we should not merely suspend our judgment as to their truth or falsity, but
should actually reject their claims to any truth value. Yet as R. H. Popkin has remarked,
sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Pyrrhonists wished not simply to destroy the
supposed certainties of human knowledge, but also to prepare the mind to receive a
superhuman truth that could come only from above: the nouveaux Pyrrhoniens aimed,
as much as the mature Descartes did, to find certain knowledge. But they hopedrather
like the Descartes of 1619to find it miraculously, to have it suddenly delivered to them
by God (Popkin, 182). Their Pyrrhonist tropes, demolishing any human criterion of truth,

23
made them the more thirsty for a divinely authorized criterion. Thus, for example,
Montaigne writes in his Apologie of Raymond Sebond (I quote from the translation of
Florio) that Pyrrhonism representeth man bare and naked, acknowledging his naturall
weaknesse, apt to receive from above some strange power, disfurnished of all humane
knowledge, and so much the more fitte to harbour divine understanding, disannulling his
judgement, that so he may give more place unto faith (Montaigne, 1904-06, 2: 233). 26
At this point, as has often been observed, Montaigne's debt to the fideism of
Cornelius Agrippa's De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium (1530) is palpable
(see Villey, 2: 166-70). And the writings of this early sixteenth-century humanist and
magician anticipate in a remarkable way the full range of tendencies attacked by Garasse
and Mersenne. Agrippa's De occulta philosophia libri tres (1533), which was of central
importance to magi from John Dee and Giordano Bruno in the sixteenth century to
Thomas Vaughan in the 1650s, made him notorious as a Hermetic magician and cabalist;
and a spurious Fourth Book which was widely accepted as authentic exaggerated the
demonic implications of his magic. But not only did Agrippa practise and write about all of
the occult sciences, including alchemy, he also wrote against most of them in his De
vanitate. In this book, setting out to demolish or at least to cast doubt upon all human arts
and sciences, he presented himself as at once a radical evangelical reformer, a sceptic, and
a mocking subverter of the established order and its pietiesas, in effect, the Lucianic
ironist and libertine denounced by Calvin in his De scandalis.27
What Florio translates as bare and naked is nu et vide in Montaigne's text (see
Montaigne, 1965, 2: 226).
27 For Calvin's denunciation of Agrippa and other Lucianici homines, see De
scandalis, in Calvin, 1552, sig. Ccc2-3; and for analyses of Agrippa's ironies and
libertine tendencies, Korkowski, 594-607, and Wirth, 609-13. On Agrippa's relation to
the 'radical reformers,' see Zambelli, 1969 and 1976. De vanitate has often been
discussed as an early instance of sixteenth-century scepticism; R. H. Popkin in
surveying these discussions finds the work to be an instance less of scepticism than
of fundamentalist anti-intellectualism (Popkin, 24); Backus argues for different
reasons that the term 'sceptic' is inappropriate. But neither Popkin nor Backus takes
any notice of Ch. 7 of De vanitate, where there is a brief but coherent argument to
the effect that our senses are often deceived and cannot in any case attaine to the
intellectual nature, and the causes of the inferiour things, from which it follows that
26

24
Agrippa seems to have been widely read in France. The Latin text of De vanitate,
first published in 1530, was frequently reprinted, and the work went through at least five
editions in French by 1617 (two more followed in 1623 and 1630). 28 Different editions of
Agrippa's Opera were also in circulation, the most recent being the one printed at Lyons in
1600. Needless to say, he was a controversial figure: Jean Bodin attacked him in 1580 as
the greatest sorcerer of his age (Bodin, fol. 20, sig. E4, fol. 219-20, sig. IIi 3v-4), and
four years later Andr Thevet lamented that Had it pleased God that Agrippa should have
drowned only himself in that abyss of impiety, we would not today be faced with such a
heap of atheists, backbiters and lampooners as this century has produced.... He hatched
infinite swarms both of magicians and of atheists... (Thevet, 2: fol. 544). 29 In the early
seventeenth century Agrippa continued to attract comment: in 1603 Jean Belot criticized
(at the same time plagiarizing) his occult philosophy (Belot; see Secret, 290); in 1623
Mersenne denounced him as an Archimagus (Mersenne, 1623, col. 590); and two years
later Gabriel Naud defended his reputation, along with that of other great men falsely
accused of magic (Naud, 400-29).
Perhaps more to the point, Descartes mentions Agrippa in a letter of April 1619 to
Isaac Beeckman. In March of that year he had written to Beeckman of his plans for a
fundamentally new science which he contrasted to the Ars brevis of Raymond Lull. In
April, he told of meeting a man who, while admitting that Lull's art and Agrippa's
commentaries on it consisted of a mere ordering of the parts of dialectic, also claimed that
there were, in addition, certain keys which could open up the secrets of this art. To
Descartes' request that he check this in his copy of the book, Beeckman replied that the
supposed keys are in Agrippa's text; you yourself would have noticed them, not long ago,
al these derivations and sciences, which are fast rooted in the senses shalbe
uncertaine, erroneous, and deceiptful... (Agrippa, 1974, 49).
28 See Gouhier, 114, and Graesse, 1: 45.
29 Thevet's French: Et, pleut Dieu, que tout seul il se fust noy en ce goulfre
d'impiet, auiourd'huy nous n'aurions un tas d'Athees, de mesdisans & brocardeurs,
comme ce siecle les nous a produict.... Pour la Magie & Atheisme Agrippa en a esclos
une infinit de formillieres....

25
had you wished to (Descartes, 1974, 10: 165-68). During the previous winter, then, when
he and Beeckman were together, Descartes had access to this bookand as Charles Adam
proposed, there is reason to believe that the book in question was the Lyons edition of
Agrippa's Opera published in 1600 (see Descartes, 1974, 10: 63, note d, and Gouhier, 28,
111). From the contempt with which Descartes wrote to Beeckman of the Lullian whose
claims of secret knowledge inspired his requesthis knowledge, drawn from books
(libris), was on his lips (labris) rather than in his mindinterpreters of this episode have
too easily concluded that Descartes felt a similar contempt for Agrippa. But this opinion in
fact echoes Agrippa's own dismissal, in De vanitate, of the Art of Lull as one which
availeth more to the outward shewe of the witte, and to the ostentation of Learninge,
then to gette knowledge, and hathe mutche more presumptuousnesse, then efficacie
(Agrippa, 1974, 56 [ch. 9]).30
I have no intention of substituting, in place of the roman rosi-crucien31 of certain
modern scholars who would have made Descartes an adherent of that shadowy sect, an
even less substantial roman agrippain. On the other hand, it might be rash to accept at
face value Descartes' statement in the Discourse that even before leaving La Flche he
knew well enough what false doctrines were worth to be subject to deception neither by
the promises of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a
magician, or the artifices or empty boasts of any of those who profess to know more than
they do (Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 576). For his attitude towards imposture and artifice was
perhaps more complicated than this text would suggest. In La recherche de la vrit his
spokesman Eudoxus lays out the order he will follow in expounding his method: beginning
with the rational soul, in which all our knowledge resides, he will then consider its
author and His nature, our knowledge of other creatures, the operations of our senses, and
Agrippa's Latin reads as follows: Hoc autem admonere vos oportet, hanc artem
ad pompam ingenii & doctrinae ostentationem potius, qum ad comparandam
eruditionem valere, ac long plus habere audaciae, qum efficaciae (Agrippa,
1970, 2: 40).
31 The expression is Henri Gouhier's; see Gouhier, 150-57.
30

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the manner in which our thoughts become true or false. Then I shall display here the
works of man upon corporeal objects, and having struck wonder into you with the most
powerful machines, the rarest automata, the most specious visions, and the subtlest
impostures that artifice can invent, I shall reveal to you their secrets, which are so simple
and so innocent that you will henceforth wonder at nothing in the works of our hands
(Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 1114). What Descartes promises is to demystify the impostures of
artifice: he will incite wonder only in order to efface it. But the first step of this double
movement is one of self-imposition through artificeand turning to Descartes'
manuscripts of the years 1619 to 1621, one finds repeated intimations of this same first
step, but no hint of a subsequent demystification. He proposes, for example, that
In a garden one can make shadows which represent diverse figures,
such as trees and others. . .
Item, in a room, to arrange that the rays of the sun, passing through
certain openings, represent various numbers or figures:
Item, to make appear, in a room, tongues of fire, chariots of fire
and other figures in the air; all this with certain mirrors which focus
the sun's rays on those points.... (Descartes, 1974, 10: 215-16)
Such visions apparentes as these, derived, it would seem, from a reading of Giovanni
Battista Porta's De magia naturali (1558), were part of the stock in trade of Renaissance
natural magic. So also were automata like the famous dove of Archytas, which is
mentioned by Descartes in another note, and which, as Charles Adam remarks, he could
have read about in Agrippa's De occulta philosophia.32

For the evidence that the young Descartes had read Porta, see Gouhier, 112-13.
The natural magic of optical illusions could be used to demystify commonly
accepted superstitions: thus Vanini had proposed in his De admirandis naturae
deaeque (1616) that stories of angelic apparitions could be accounted for by
mirrors; see Mersenne, 1623, cols. 475-8, 500-37, and Hine, 167-70. On Descartes'
allusion to the dove of Archytas, see Descartes, 1974, 10: 232.
32

27
In 1628, according to Beeckman's journal, he and Descartes amused themselves by
mocking Agrippa and Porta (Descartes, 1974, 10: 347). But it seems likely that nine years
earlier, Descartes might easily have understood Agrippathe more sceptical side of him,
that is, the author of De vanitateas writing from a situation not unlike his own.
Ferdinand Alqui has remarked of Descartes' account of his schooling in the first part of
the Discourse on Method that At the end of such a description, one is convinced that
Descartes' doubt was not simply voluntary and methodical. In his youth and at the end of
his studies, Descartes experienced a doubt that was profound and spontaneous, a real
disillusionment (Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 576 n.2). This young man apparently had access
to Agrippa's Opera omnia at the time of his encounter with Beeckman in the winter of
1618-19, if not before. He might then have been receptive to the Hermetic illuminism
which pervades both the third book of De occulta philosophia and the later chapters of
De vanitatewhere Agrippa insists, for example, that
God alone contains the fountain of truth, from which he must drink
who desires true doctrines: since there is not, nor can be had, any
science of the secrets of nature, of the separate substances, much less
of God their author, unless it be revealed by divine inspiration. For
divine things are not touched by human powers, and natural things at
every moment flee from the power of sense.... 33
Another text printed in the same edition of Agrippa's Opera, entitled De magia seu
pneumatica veterum and ascribed to one 'Arbatel,' may help to explain the title of
Descartes' Olympica (the word does not occur in classical Latin)and may also in some
Agrippa, 1970, 2: 299-300 (cap. C): DEUS enim solus fontem veritatis continet, a
quo haurire necesse est qui vera dogmata cupit, cum nulla sit nec haberi possit de
secretis naturae, de substantiis separatis, deque ipsorum authore Deo scientia, nisi
divinitus revelata: divina enim humanis viribus non tanguntur, & naturalia quovis
momento sensum effugiunt.... 'Separate substances' means spirits or intelligences.
On that Hermetic illuminism which is the basis of Agrippa's understanding both of
the highest forms of magic and of the Christian religion, see my article Agrippa's
Dilemma (Keefer, 1988a).
33

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sense underlie the revelatory experience recorded in that manuscript. Seven of the fortynine aphorisms which constitute this short text are concerned with Olympic spirits or the
spirits of Olympus. 'Arbatel' writes that these stellar intelligences are counted among the
angels of God by whom, according to the New Testament and the traditions of the
Egyptians (which is to say the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus), all sciences
have been delivered to mankind; the particular role of Olympic spirits is to declare human
destinies and to impart wisdom (Agrippa, 1970, 1: 710-13 [Arbatel, De magia, aphorisms
12-15]). A magician is defined in this text as one to whom, by the grace of God, the spirits
have given knowledge of the secrets of nature; shortly thereafter the writer addsI quote
from a seventeenth-century translationthat The passage from the common life of man
unto a Magical life, is no other but a sleep, from that life; and an awakening to this life...
(Agrippa, 1655, 213 [aphorisms 41 and 44]). 34 Yet this transition may be a dangerous one,
for while Olympus and the inhabitants thereof, do of their own accord offer themselves
to men in the form of Spirits, another kind of being is attracted to us by our sinsevil
spirits, who in another aphorism are said to be the cause of all corruption in human
knowledge, sow[ing] tares amongst the children of disobedience, as it is manifest out of
St. Paul, and Hermes Trismegistus. Whoever therefore wishes spiritual illumination must
keep himself from all enormious sins, and diligently pray to the most High to be his
keeper; and he shall break through all the snares and impediments of the devil... (Agrippa,
1655, 194, 184 [aphorisms 19, 12, 19]).35
For all its naivety, this text reflects a mind-set not far removed from that of the
dreams recorded by Descartes in his Olympica, in which the assault of an evil spirit and an
incitement to remorse over his past sins was followed by a kind of revelation. His dreams
Compare Agrippa, 1970, 1: 735: Transitus de communi hominum vita, ad vitam
magicam, non est alius nisi de cadem vita dormientem ad eandem vitam
vigilantem.
35 Cf. Agrippa, 1970, 1: 719, 711. The reference in aphorism 12 is to Romans 1: 1823 and to the 'Hermetic apocalypse' in the Asclepiusfor the text of which see
Hermes, 1960, 2: 326 ff., and Hermes, 1992, 81-83.
34

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seem to have authenticated, rather than transmitted, the mirabilis scientiae fundamenta.
But their genre is clearly that of the dreams alluded to in a Paracelsan text according to
which
Many wonderful Arts and Sciences also have seemed to be made
appeare to Artists in their dreams. . . : this oftentimes happeneth, but
the greatest part perisheth in oblivion: some rising early in the
morning, say, This night a wonderful dreame appeared to me, as that
Mercury, or this or that Philosopher corporally appeared to me in a
dreame, who taught me this or that Art; but it is fallen out of my
memory. . . .
The author of the Olympica was presumably familiar with the sort of advice this text
offers: To whom any such thing hath happened, he ought not to go forth out of his
chamber, nor speak with any man until he call to remembrance that which he had
forgotten (Paracelsus, 47-48).36

VI

My argument does not require us to believe that the young Descartes was
conclusively influenced by the writings of sixteenth-century occultists like Agrippa,
Paracelsus, or 'Arbatel'most of which he could with good reason have dismissed, even in
1619, as superstitious, silly, and vain. However, I would propose that he was familiar
whether directly or indirectlywith the 'philosophical' writings attributed to Hermes (or
Mercurius) Trismegistus. Agrippa and other occultist writers would have pointed him in
this direction: the philosophical Hermetica were a principal source both of Renaissance
For detailed discussions of the genre of Descartes' dreams in terms of the
classical tradition of dream-interpretation, see Browne and Wagner.
36

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magical doctrines and of that prisca theologia, larded with supposedly pre-Christian
anticipations of Christianity, which legitimized this magic. Oddly enough, more orthodox
writers could also have directed him to Hermes. Even for those polemicists of the 1620s,
Garasse and Mersenne, the name of Hermes was not one to be scoffed at. The former, in
speaking of destiny, places Mercure Trismgiste at the head of a list of les plus sages
d'entre les Philosophes who have written on this subject, if too obscurely for Garasse's
taste (Garasse, 1: 345-46). And Mersenne, the first two chapters of whose L'impit des
distes consist of a declamation in the Hermetic manner on the excellence of man, in a
later chapter refers his reader for evidence of the piety of ancient philosophers to the De
perenni philosophia (1540) of Augustinus Steuchus Eugubinusa work which, presenting
Mercurius Trismegistus as the most ancient source from whom the Greek philosophers
derived their theology, also expounds his opinions in some detail.37 Other writers, whom
Descartes might have read before 1619, are very much more positive. Pontus de Tyard,
Bishop of Chalon-sur-Sane, compared the prayer at the end of the first dialogue of
Hermes' Pimander to the psalms of David (Tyard, fol. 112v-113; qtd. in Walker, 69); and
Franois de Foix, duc de Candale and Bishop of Aire, believing that Hermes had received
from God the same instruction as had Moses, the prophets and the apostles, wrote that
since he agrees with and expounds the scriptures, one cannot go wrong in revering his
opinion (Foix, sig. A2; qtd. in Walker, 69). (Foix de Candale, interestingly, was a
mathematician as well as a Christian Hermetist: of his five published works, three are
In the first two chapters of L'impit des distes Mersenne is clearly appropriating
for his own uses that discourse on human power and dignity one of the major
sources of which was the Hermetic Asclepius; the speaker in his dialogue who
delivers this declamation is Aesculape. On p. 140 Mersenne refers the reader to
Steuchuswho devoted the major part of I. viii-x, xxiii-xxvi, II. xvii, and X. x of his De
perenni philosophia to expounding Hermetic texts; in I. x he writes: Is ut apparet
fuit fons Graecae Philosophiae, inde Theologiam hauserunt; and in X. x: Mercurius
Trismegistus vetustissimus fons, unde manavit Graecorum Theologia... (Steuchus,
21, 577). As Mersenne was well aware, Steuchus was also an unimpeachably
orthodox Counter-Reformation polemicist whose other books include Pro religione
christiana adversus Lutheranos (1530) and Contra Laurentium Vallam, de falsa
donatione Constantini, libri duo (1547): see Delph, 104-36.
37

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editions and translations of the Pimander.... The remaining two are editions of Euclid's
Elements [Harrie, 503]).38
What, then, could Descartes have found in Hermes Trismegistus? An answer, of a
kind, to that fear of psychological overdetermination which is imaged in the first of his
three dreams (and which Mersenne's attack upon the deists might suggest was prompted
by the doctrines of Calvin)for the Hermetic writings contain repeated proclamations of
the quasi-divine autonomy of the human mind. But much else besides.
I have proposed that in his meditations of November 1619 Descartes was trying to
separate his mind from his body (the left-right asymmetry of his first dream suggests that
he succeeded in creating such a psychic split), and that he was doing so in the expectation
of being rewarded with a visionary revelation. His doubt, his rejection of all his previous
opinions, was also an attempt to recognize and isolate that which in him could truly know:
his own essential self. One need go no further than the first and thirteenth dialogues of the
Hermetic Pimander in order to appreciate the Hermetic orientation of this project.
The first dialogue, the seminal Hermetic text (whose title Poimandres or Pimander
Marsilio Ficino took to apply to the whole body of Hermetic writings he translated),
consists largely of a vision and a divine discourse which result from the narrator's
meditation de rerum natura: my intellectual perceptions were borne aloft, he says, and
my bodily senses lulled, as commonly happens to those who, through fatigue or satiety, are
oppressed by sleepwhen suddenly I perceived a being of immense size who called me by
name, saying: 'What, o Mercury, do you wish to hear, to consider, to learn and
understand?' To this being, which identified itself as Pimander, the mind of the divine
power, he replied: I want to learn the nature of things, and to know God. 39
For indications of the range of writings in which the young Descartes could have
encountered similarly laudatory references to Hermes, see Yates, 1964, Marcel, and
Dronke. On the Hermetic writings, see Festugire, Fowden, and Copenhaver's very
useful bibliography in Hermes, 1992.
39 Hermes, 1532, sig. A6: Cum de rerum natura cogitarem, ac mentis aciem ad
superna erigerem, sopitis iam corporis sensibus, quemadmodum accidere solet iis,
qui ob saturitatem vel defatigationem somno gravati, sunt: subito mihi visus sum
38

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The eschatology of this text (which later dialogues of the Corpus Hermeticum, the
thirteenth in particular, assimilate to the notion of a this-wordly rebirth or deification)
involves a progressive release of the true self from what envelops it: the inactive character
(ociosus habitus) is relinquished to the [avenging] daemon and laid aside; the bodily
senses return to their sources... (Hermes, 1532, sig. B3). 40 Having received his
revelation, Hermes cries out against the enticement of irrational sleep; he has learned
that whoever recognizes himself has obtained the good which is above being; but he
whom the body envelops in the deception of love remains wandering in darkness,
perceiving by sense the evils of death (Hermes, 1532, sig. B3v, Bv). 41 Secure in his
possession of the truth about the creation of the world, the origins of mankind, and the
way to salvation, Hermes says: I inscribed the benefaction of Pimander in my innermost
mind, and having obtained all that I had sought, reposed in joy. For the sleep of the body
became sobriety of the mind, and the closing of the eyes true intuition (verus intuitus), and
my silence a fertile gestation of the good, and the speaking of the word a begetting of all
good things (Hermes, 1532, sig. B4). 42
cernere quendam immensa magnitudine corporis, qui me nomine vocans, in hunc
modum clamaret: Quid est Mercuri, quod et audire & intueri desideras? quid est
quod discere atque intelligere cupis? Tum ego: Quisnam es inquam? Sum inquit ille
Pymander, mens divinae potentiae, ac tu vide quid velis, ipse vero tibi ubique adero.
Cupio inquam rerum naturam discere, deumque cognoscere. Rather than quoting
from Cophenhaver's excellent translation (Hermes, 1992), which is made from the
Greek texts of the Hermetica and draws upon the best contemporary scholarship, I
have preferred to use Ficino's Latin translation, which was the most widely available
version of the Hermetica during the period with which I am concerned.
40 The Latin of Ficino's translation: Morum ociosus habitus daemoni conceditur
atque dimittitur. Sensus corporei partes animae facti, suos in fontes refluunt.... The
daemon alluded to here is presumably the avenger mentioned several sentences
previously by Pimander (sig. B2 v): Contra ab ignaris, improbis, ignavis, invidis,
iniquis, homicidis, impiis, procul admodum habito, permittens eos daemonis ultoris
arbitrio, qui ignis acumen incutiens, sensus affligit....
41 Ficino's Latin: O populi viri terrigenae, qui vosmetipsos ebrietati, somno, &
ignorantiae dedidistis, sobrii vivite, abstinete a ventris luxu vos, qui irrationali
somno demulcti estis (sig. B3v). Demum qui seipsum recognovit, bonum quod est
super essentiam consecutus est. Qui vero corpus amoris errore complectebatur, is
oberrabat in tenebris mortis mala sensu percipiens (sig. Bv).
42 Ego autem Pymandri beneficium inscripsi penetralibus animi, atque adeptus
quae petieram omnia in gaudio requievi: Corporis enim somnus animi sobrietas
extiterat. Oculorum compressio verus intuitus. Silentium meum bonitatis foecunda

33
In the thirteenth dialogue of the Corpus Hermeticum, the mystery of a this-worldly
rebirth is associated with a similar kind of experience, and the dualist ascesis of other
tractates (notably the first, fourth, and seventh) is developed into what might be described
as an embryonic instrumental scepticisminstrumental, because its purpose is to prepare
for a revelation which will efface all ignorance and doubt. Hermes' disciple has prepared
himself for rebirth by banish[ing] the deceptions of the world from [his] mind (Hermes,
1532, sig. G4)43; he is then initiated into a mode of understanding from which the
deceptions of the senses are excluded, and which is purely mental. Hermes' insistence that
his own reborn form cannot be perceived by bodily sight excites in his disciple a state of
inspired frenzy or madnessin effect, what Descartes' age called 'enthusiasm'to which
Hermes responds in these words: May you too, my son, go forth from yourself sleeping,
like those who are taken up by visions in their sleep (Hermes, 1532, sig. G4v). 44
What follows, however, is a waking initiation, a regeneration whose author,
according to Hermes, is the Son of God, the one man, by the will of God (Hermes,
1532, sig. G4v).45 That which is true, says Hermes, is that which is unperturbed,
unlimited, without colour, without shape, undivided, naked, clear, comprehensible to itself,
unchangeable, good, and wholly incorporeal. This truth is accessible to the mind, because
the mind's purged form is what constitutes it: Return into yourself, and you will
understand: desire it and it will be. Purge the senses of the body; release yourself from the
irrational afflictions of matter (Hermes, 1532, sig. G4v-G5). 46 Rebirth and deification are
praegnatio. Sermonis prolatio bonorum omnium genitura.
43 Ecce iam paratus sum pater, a mente mea mundi deceptiones excussi.
44 Cernis me oculi fili? Quando vero meditaris intentus corpore atque aspectu, non
oculis hisce videro. TAT. In furorem me insanumque mentis oestrum pater nimium
concitasti, in praesentiarum meipsum haud video. TRIS. Utinam fili charissime tu
quoque teipsum dormiens transcurrisses, instar eorum qui in somno insomniis
occupantur.
45 TAT. Dicage quis erit regenerationis autor? TRIS. Dei filius, homo unius voluntate
dei. Passages like this encouraged Renaissance readers to accept Hermes as a
pagan prophet of the coming of Christ.
46 TAT. Quid ergo verum Trismegiste? TRIS. Quod non perturbatum, non
determinatum, non coloratum, non figuratum, non concisum, nudum, perspicuum,
seipso comprehensibile, intransmutabile, bonum, ac penitus incorporeum. Sig. G5:

34
achieved when Hermes' disciple is lifted by divine power into contemplation of the truth:
the ten powers of God (of which the first is knowledge of God) descend into him to expel
the twelve afflictions of matter. This descent of the powers of God is a begetting of
intellect which permits a recognition of the self as divine, and also a form of understanding
not by eyesight, but by an act of mind which gives an immediate knowledge, as though
from the inside, of all nature (Hermes, 1532, sig. G6). 47 To his disciple's exultant statement
that he now sees the All, and sees himself in the Mind, Hermes replies: This, my son, is
regeneration: no longer to attend to three-dimensional corporeality (Hermes, 1532, sig.
G6v).48
There are strong grounds for claiming that Descartes' meditations and dreamrevelation in November 1619 followed the Hermetic paradigm established in these texts.
The dualist ascesis undertaken in the hope of a visionary illumination, the separation of
mind from body, the pervasive 'enthusiasm' and the resulting sense of empowerment and
certainty: all these suggest that Descartes' reading had led him to the writings of Hermes.
La gentillesse des fables rveille l'esprit: these, it would seem, were among the fables
which contributed at a crucial moment to the awakening of his mind. And they were fables
in the additional sense that their supposedly ancient author was himself entirely fabulous.
The Huguenot scholar Isaac Casaubon demonstrated in 1614 that the Hermetic writings
previously thought to be the work of an approximate contemporary of Moseswere
composed no earlier than the first century A. D.; however, this work of demolition seems

TRIS. Absit hoc fili: recurre in teipsum, & consequeris: velis, ac fiet: purga sensus
corporis, solve te ab irrationabilibus materiae ipsius ultoribus.
47 Quicunque igitur propter benignitatem generationis, quae secundum deum est,
sensum dimittit corporeum, seipsum cognoscit ex divinis compositum, factusque
indeclivis divina potentia tota mente laetatur. TAT. O pater concipio, non oculorum
intuitu, sed actu mentis, qui per vires intimas exercentur. In coelo sum, in terra, in
aqua, in are, in animalibus sum, in arboribus, in corpore, ante corpus, atque post
corpus, & ubique.
48 TAT. Eia pater universum video, meipsum in mente conspicio. TRIS. At haec est
regeneratio fili, non adesse ulterius corpori quantitate dimenso.

35
not to have become widely known until the late 1620s (Grafton, 145-61), 49 and because it
was published as part of a polemic against the Catholic church historian Baronius, it was
not accepted in some circles until at least several decades later.
There may then be unsuspected reserves of meaning in Descartes' declaration in
the Letter to Father Dinet appended to the Meditations and the Objections and Replies
a declaration which he admits may seem paradoxicalthat while in the philosophy
taught in the schools, in so far as it is Peripatetic and different from others, there is
nothing that is not new, on the contrary there is nothing in mine that is not ancient.... By
this Descartes means that the principles of the Aristotelians were innovations when they
were first introduced, and have since been the subject of constant revisions and
wranglings; he, in contrast, accepts only those principles which up to now have been
known and admitted by all philosophers, and which for that reason are the most ancient of
all... (Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 1088). Would it be extravagant to construe these words as
implying some degree of affiliation to that most ancient philosopher Hermes Trismegistus,
who was still, in the 1640s and later, being held up by a distinguished member of Dinet's
Jesuit order as the major source of what Steuchus a century earlier had called the
philosophia perennis? (see Yates, 1964, 416-23).

VII

The Hermetic writings mentioned above would seem to anticipate in certain

respects the movement of Descartes' mature philosophy through scepticism to a
perception of the irreducible incorporeal self, an abstract knowledge of God, and a
division of the world into thinking substance and extension. Whether these anticipations
In 1630 Mersenne made use of Casaubon's demolition of Hermes in his
controversy with Fludd; his earlier writings show no awareness of Casaubon's work
(Yates, 1964, 434-40).
49

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are sufficiently distinct to be of analytical interest is another matter altogether. Yet it does
seem worth remarking that there appear to be echoes of these texts (and of derivative
Renaissance texts) in Descartes' mature writings.
Consider, for example, the concluding paragraph of the first of his Meditations of
1641. It is here that Descartes introduces for the first time the hypothesis of an evil
genius not less powerful than deceitful, who has employed all his energies in deceiving
me.... Whatever the logical force of this supposition, its immediate rhetorical effect is to
dispose of the speaker's body: I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no
flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to have all these things
(Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 181).50
One way of responding to the evil genius hypothesisperhaps, in any context but
the present, a slightly eccentric waywould be to observe that this passage constitutes
part of a rather peculiar sequence of metaphorical exchanges in Descartes' writings. These
exchanges involve two primary terms, the body and the evil genius, and also a third term
quelques fantmeswhich in some sense mediates between them. The sequence can
be traced in three texts: in the Olympica and La recherche de la vrit, as well as in this
passage of the Meditations.
In Descartes' first dream of November 10, 1619 the phantoms which make the
right side of his body powerless are apparently allied to the wind, the evil genius. In a
passage transcribed by Leibniz which Alqui believes formed part of the Olympica,
Descartes himself commented on the more obvious of these dream-metaphors: Sensibilia
apta concipiendis Olympicis: ventus spiritum significat.... Sensible things enable us to
conceive the things of Olympus: wind signifies spirit.... This linkage of wind with spirit is
unexceptionablethough in the context of the first dream it may seem peculiar that
Descartes makes no attempt to draw a line between the wind which is an evil genius and a
In the French text (Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 412) this last paragraph is divided into
two paragraphs.
50

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wind blowing from Olympus. But what of the phantoms? Are they not also a metaphorical
vehicle? Another remark copied by Leibniz from the same text indicates an awareness that
metaphorical exchanges can operate in more than one direction: Just as the imagination
uses figures to conceive bodies (Ut imaginatio utitur figuris ad corpora concipienda), so
the intellect uses certain sensible bodies to figure spiritual things (ita intellectus utitur
quibusdam corporibus sensibilibus ad spiritualia figuranda).... (Descartes, 1974, 10:
218, 217). The chiastic form of this sentence makes explicit a paradoxical doubleness: the
figures bodied forth by imagination are an immaterial representation of the corporeal,
while the sensible bodies summoned up by the intellect are a corporeal figuration of the
spiritual. If Descartes' first dream incorporates a double exchange of this sort, then just as
the wind signifies the evil genius, so the phantoms would signify the body from which it
had apparently been the dreamer's waking project to divorce himself.
This imaginative figuration recurs in La recherche de la vrit in what may at first
seem a strikingly different manner: the phantoms and vain images by which Descartes
represents the systematic doubt he is proposing will, he promises, be revealed upon a close
approach as nothing but air and shadow: rien, que de l'air et de l'ombre. In what way are
these phantoms related to the body?
I would like to suggest that the last word of that sentence in La recherche de la
vritrien, que de l'air et de l'ombremay have resonances inaudible to the modern
reader. In a commentary on Paracelsus by Jacques Gohory, a sixteenth-century occultist,
one reads that The Olympic spirit who plucks away the shadow (Spiritus Olympicus qui
umbram avellit), and in this the cabalistic art consists, is the star in man (Suavius, 52;
qtd. in Gouhier, 88, n. 7). The shadow or umbra is explained by Marsilio Ficino in his
Theologia Platonica as the term applied by the 'ancient theologians' to the elemental murk
(caligo elementalis) with which the soul is surrounded, most particularly during this life
(Ficino, 233). Iamblichus, similarly, in his De mysteriis Aegyptiis, identifies the body and
matter with shadows and irrationality (Iamblichus, VI. 4, 185). So also does one of their

38
common sources, the first dialogue of the Pimander of Hermes Trismegistuswhere, in
Ficino's translation, the key word is again umbra, and where the insistent lesson is of a
separation of mind from body which will free the self from the deceptions of the senses
and from what in the thirteenth dialogue are called the irrational afflictions of matter
(Hermes, 1532, sig. B2).51
Did Descartes' Olympic spirit, in proclaiming his destiny, free him from his umbra
at the same time as from any lingering fear of those ombres which had appeared to him
at the beginning of his first dream? What then of the act of demystification in La recherche
de la vrit which undoes the metaphor of the phantoms, reducing them to air and
shadow? Might one describe this as a controlled repetition of that foundational
experience? The phantoms which in the dream were linked to the body now signify fears
prompted by doubta shift in signifieds which may seem less startling if it is remembered
that what Baillet wrote of as Descartes' attempt to represent his mind to himself entirely
naked was recalled by the philosopher in his Discourse as a project of ridding himself of
his former opinions. There is, surely, no reason to regard these two descriptions as
mutually contradictory.
In the Meditations the same complex of metaphorical exchanges resurfaces. One
encounters in the First Meditation not the phantoms of doubt, but in their place the evil
genius (whose earliest appearance, in the dream of 1619, was as their supplement and ally)
and the act of confronting this demon of doubt effectively does away with the body by
imposing a recognition of the self as incorporeal, as radically disembodiedas a res
cogitans.

TRIS. cur digni morte sint ii qui in morte iacent? PYM. Quia praecessit proprio
corpori tristis umbra, ex hac quidem natura humida, ex hac vero corpus in mundo
sensibili constitit.... In the vision of the cosmogonic process with which this text
begins (sig. A6v), an umbra quaedam horrenda turns into the natura humida,
with great effects of son et lumire. In the dialogus decimitertius Hermes exhorts
his disciple: ... purga sensus corporis, solve te ab irrationabilibus materiae ipsius
ultoribus (sig. G5).
51

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The extraordinary labyrinthine simile with which Descartes concludes the First
Meditation may contain less distant echoes of Hermetic texts. Descartes writes that the
task of resisting the hypothetical evil genius, of taking his belief in his own body to be the
result of demonic deceptions, of suspending all judgments,
is a laborious one, and insensibly a certain lassitude leads me back into
the course of my ordinary life. And just as a captive who in sleep enjoys
an imaginary liberty, when he begins to suspect that his liberty is but a
dream, fears to be awakened, and conspires with these agreeable illusions
to prolong his deception, so insensibly of my own accord I fall back into
my former opinions, and I am anxious about being roused from this
slumber, lest the laborious wakefulness which would follow the
tranquillity of this repose should have to be spent not in daylight, but in
the excessive darkness of the difficulties which have just been discussed.
Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 181-82 [Latin text], 1: 412-13 [French
version]).52
This simile achieves a remarkable inversion. Ordinary waking consciousness is compared
to a captive's dream of liberty, an agreeable illusion, a state of repose. And the peculiar
disembodied state into which Descartes has projected himselfin which he has raised the
fear of insanity, and suspects he could be dreaming, or subject to the systematic deceptions
of the evil geniusis a true, a strenuous wakefulness (in which, presumably, resistance to
captivity becomes possible). If Plato's allegory of the cave seems the most obvious source
for this passage, that is only because modern Cartesian scholars are more likely to have
read Plato than Hermes. The first dialogue of the Pimander links slavery and confinement
with the enticements of irrational sleep, and preaching a return to the wakeful state in
which we were created, calls upon us who labour in want, enveloped in the shadows of
The translation offered here is largely based on that of Haldane and Ross in
Descartes, 1973, 1: 148-49.
52

40
ignorance, to recover our true selves (Hermes, 1532, sig. A8v)53 Descartes may have
been remembering eitheror more probably bothof these ancient fabulists when he
wove together this brilliantly persuasive text.

VIII

When Cornelius Agrippa in his De vanitate turned from the labour of refuting the
philosophers to the more congenial business of calling them names, one of the most
provoking things he could think of to say was that philosophy first developed out of the
trifles and fables of the poetswhich, he says in another chapter, were written to no
other ende, but to the delite of fooles... (Agrippa, 1974, 143 [cap. 49], 33 [cap. 4]). I
have been suggesting here that Descartes' philosophy was decisively indebted to those
writers of the first centuries A. D.one might almost call them poetswho effectively
created Hermes Trismegistus by fathering upon this Hellenized form of the Egyptian god
Thoth a body of quasi-philosophical writings. This is not to challenge Descartes' claim to
have returned to first principles; it is, rather, to give force and specificity to what would
otherwise be a banal observation: namely, that any sense of what first principles are, and
any project of returning to them, must both be textually conditioned.
Descartes' own insistent metaphor of the path suggests as much. Quod vitae
sectabor iter? Before it can be followed, the path must in some sense be already
delineatedfailing which, one is at the mercy of that blind curiosity which, in Rule 4 of
the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes says leads men to conduct their minds
Homo igitur harmonia superior extitit: in harmoniam vero lapsus, periclitatus,
servus effectus est. Hic utriusque sexus foecunditate munitus ab eo qui amborum
sexuum fons est, vigilque factus ab eo qui est vigilans, continetur, atque eius
dominationi subjicitur. Sig. B3 v: O populi viri terrigenae, qui vosmetipsos ebrietati,
somno, & ignorantiae dedidistis, sobrii vivite, abstinete a ventris luxu vos, qui
irrationali somno demulcti estis.... Revocate iam vosmet, qui laboratis inopia,
ignorantiae tenebris involuti.
53

41
along unknown routes, hoping to find by pure chance the truth they seek (Descartes,
1963-73, 1: 90). Yet while the existence of a vrai chemin which is to be followed is
implied by the notion of method, the formulation of this notion also suggests the
projection of previously undiscovered paths, and the construction of new roads. 54 The
metaphor is inescapably duplicitous.
To say that the path which became Descartes' fully elaborated method was in some
sense supplied to him by the revived Hermetic tradition of the Renaissance does not
therefore amount to rejecting what must be obviousthat his interest in certain features of
this tradition, partial to begin with, was in most respects rapidly outgrown. In Part II of
the Discourse, speaking of his meditations of November 1619, and of his decision to strip
himself of his former opinions, Descartes writes: But like a man who walks alone and in
darkness, I resolved to go so slowly, and to use so much circumspection in all things, that
even if I advanced only very little, I would at least take care not to fall (Descartes, 196373, 1: 584). This, it would seem, is a masked allusion to what I have called the primal
scene of Cartesian philosophy, in which Descartes' best efforts barely sufficed to keep him
from fallingyet it appears to be back-dated from the first dream of November 10 to the
period immediately preceding the dreams. When, by my analysis, Descartes was refashioning himself according to a Hermetic paradigmentering, that is to say, a path
marked out by Hermes and his Renaissance interpretershe was thus, by his own
retrospective account, advancing alone, cautiously and in the shadows. The duplicity of
the path metaphor validates this statement: even if one believes that, in recalling his past,
Descartes was also revising it, one can concede that, whatever his debts to a Hermetic
paradigm, he was also in late 1619 engaged in searching out a new path.

For the metaphor of a pre-existent path, see Discours, III (Descartes, 1963-73, 1:
594, 598); the notion of building a new road appears in Part II, where the idea is said
to be inapplicable to la rformation des moindres choses qui touchent le public
(Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 582).
54

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This process, as tienne Gilson demonstrated long since, involved an appropriation
of elements of the scholastic tradition. And to the literary expression of the resulting
system even the egregious Franois Garasse may have contributed: a sentence in La
doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits anticipates closely the famous first sentence of the
Discourse on Method, and may well be its immediate source. 55 I will not attempt to
explain how Descartes' Hermetic borrowings may be related to his appropriations of
certain features of scholastic philosophy, much less how he could have read as far as page
56 of Garasse's book before throwing it aside in disgust. But an indication, in concluding,
of another tradition to which Descartes appears also to have been responding may help
both to reveal more fully the originality of his itinerary and to complete my analysis of his
relations to Hermetism.
In the second section of this essay I remarked on the image of psychic
overdetermination provided in Descartes' first dream of November 10, 1619 by the wind's
attempt to push him into a church in which he had already decided to seek shelter from
that same wind; and I commented also on the curious overlap, in Descartes' own
interpretation of his dreams, of his good Genius, the evil spirit, and the God who governs
the entire episode. If the wind, and the spiritual force it represents, threatened the
dreamer's autonomy, his resistance implies a counter-assertion byone might sayeither
the self-determining mens of the Hermetists or the nascent Cartesian subject. In the
following section I observed that the arguments of systematic doubt, in the culminative
form of the evil genius hypothesis, constitute an analogous threat to human autonomy
one which is triumphantly resisted by the proclamation of cogito, ergo sum. Tullio
Gregory and other scholars have with admirable precision situated the evil genius of the
Meditations, and the closely-linked issue of whether God can be a deceiver, in relation to
Garasse, 1: 56: Jamais Platon n'avana plus belle maxime que celle par laquelle
il dit qu'il n'y a partage au monde si bien faict que celuy des Esprits, d'autant, dit-il,
que tous les hommes en pensent avoir assez, il n'y a si pauvre idiot qui ne s'en
contente.... Compare Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 568.
55

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late-scholastic discussions of the same questions.56 But I would propose that the evil spirit
of the Olympica and the evil genius of the Meditations are more pressingly related to that
Calvinist theology which Mersenne's refutation of the Pote Calvino-diste shows to
have been a live issue at the time. In confronting these spirits, Descartes was standing up
to the most extreme contemporaneous threat to the autonomy he wished to assert: he was
in effect confronting the God of the Calvinists.
There are several good reasons why a young man who wished to establish a secure
and metaphysically-grounded method of discovering the truth should have found himself
engaged in such a confrontation. Politically speaking, Calvinism may have been a spent
force in France by 1619, but it continued to pose an intellectual challenge as a persuasive
explanation of the relationship between an omnipotent and omniscient deity and a creation
which is somehow distinct from him.
The insistence on the complete and uncompromised sovereignty of God's will
which is one of the distinguishing features of Calvin's theology entails a rejection of the
autonomy of created beings, the possibility of free-will, and the very notion of
contingency, as derogations from the majesty of the Creator.57 The ethical consequences of
this doctrine are disturbing: God's will, according to Calvin, is the active cause of every
event or action, either good or evil; and God foreknows who will be damned and saved for
the very good reason that he has willed it from all eternity. This judgment actualizes itself
in humans, through divine grace or the lack of it, in the form of the individual's selfvalidating conviction (which amounts either to faith or to despair) with respect to his or
her eternal destination.

See Gregory, and the works by other scholars, especially H. G. Frankfurt, R.

Kennington, and G. Rodis-Lewis, which are cited in his article.
57 Calvin's view of divine sovereignty and of its consequences with respect to
contingency, free-will and human autonomy is set forth in Calvin 1960, 1: 197-217 (I.
xvi.1-9, I. xvii.1-5). On free-will, see further II. ii.1-11, II. ii. 26-7, II. iii. 5, II. v.1-19. On
the primacy of the divine will, see III. xxiii. 6. In these remarks on Calvin I am
drawing upon my essay Accommodation and Synecdoche (Keefer 1988b).
56

44
Calvin can avoid the conclusion that God is evil (a conclusion drawn by the poet
whom Mersenne took such pains to refute in L'impit des distes) only by asserting
God's utter incomprehensibility. He distinguishes repeatedly between the inscrutable reality
and the accommodated forms in which the divinity typically represents himself to
humankind. But accommodation, a trope of mediation between the human knower and the
unknowable, is also one which invests with an aura of the fictive the divinely-authored
discourses to which it is applied, making them fables as well as vehicles ofhere one
needs inverted commas or scare quotesof 'truth.' As a result, the attributes ascribed by
God to himself are deprived of any distinct meaning, since they correspond neither to the
incomprehensible divine reality nor to human realities (God's justice and human justice, to
take one example, are said to be incommensurable).58
In effect, contingency is displaced by this theology from the phenomenal to a
transcendental realmwhere it assumes the alarming form of a divine will which the
faithful will term inscrutable, but which others (at their own risk) may prefer to call
arbitrary and capricious. This divine will empties the concept of natural law: according to
Calvin, the sun rises each day by God's command alone (Calvin, 1960, I. xvi. 2), and not
even an abundance of bread would benefit us in the slightest unless it were divinely turned
into nourishment (Calvin, 1960, 2: 909 [III. xx. 44]). The system of nature serves to
confirm that state of condemnation which is the common lot of all except those who
receive the arbitrary gift of divine grace: The purpose of natural law, Calvin writes, ...
is to render man inexcusable (Calvin, 1960, 1: 282 [II. ii. 22]). The problem posed on the
ethical level by a deity who cannot reliably be distinguished from the evil spirits who are
For instances of Calvin's reliance on the notion of accommodation, see Calvin,
1960, I. xi. 2-3, I. xiv. 3, I. xvii.12-13, II. xi.13, II. xvi. 2. The notion is also implicit in I.
xvi. 9 and III. xviii. 9. David Hume was to write, with obvious reference to Calvinism:
The Deity, I can readily allow, possesses many powers and attributes, of which we
can have no comprehension: But if our ideas, so far as they go, be not just and
adequate, and correspondent to his real nature, I know not what there is in this
subject worth insisting on. Is the name, without any meaning, of such mighty
importance? (Hume, 158).
58

45
among his agents thus appears to resurface on the epistemic level: the natural world is as
much a structure of entrapment as it is an object of knowledge, and any sense that it is
bound by law is subverted by assertions that the divine will which in every respect controls
it is itself both unconstrained and unintelligible.
In his Second Meditation, Descartes determines that whatever the efforts of the
evil genius, without doubt I exist also if he deceives mefrom which it follows that
this proposition: I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I
mentally conceive it (Descartes, 1973, 1: 150; cf. Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 183, 415-16).
But this position of decipior sive cogito, ergo sum is separated by a wide chasm from the
assurance that such a reflexive self-recognition can provide a criterion of certainty from
which other truths can be deduced. Descartes' movement in the Meditations from the evil
genius hypothesis to the assurance that God is the guarantor of truth is, in effect, an act of
faith. In his reply to the second set of Objections (composed by Mersenne), he insisted that
an atheist cannot possess true science: he cannot be sure that he is not deceived in the
things that seem most evident to him...; and though perchance the doubt does not occur to
him he can never be safe from it unless he first recognizes the existence of a God
(Descartes, 1973, 2: 39; cf. Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 565).
To Mersenne's remark that the Scriptures themselves indicate that God may
sometimes deceive us, Descartes responded with an intriguingly duplicitous use of the
trope of accommodation. Everyone, he says, knows the distinction between those
modes of speaking about God which are commonly used in the Scriptures, and which are
accommodated to the vulgar understanding (ad vulgi sensum accommodatos)..., and those
others which express a more naked truth (magis nudam veritatem)..., and which everyone
should use in philosophy... (Descartes, 1974, 7: 142; cf. Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 566-67).
Yet having thus dismissed inconvenient scriptural passages as irrelevant, on the grounds
that philosophy should concern itself with the underlying verity rather than with
accommodated representations of God, he then refuses even to consider the possibility

46
that what we perceive as true may appear false to God or to an angel, and thus, as an
accommodated representation, be relatively true but, in absolute terms, false. Why should
we be bothered with this absolute falsity, since we neither believe in it nor even suspect its
existence? We have assumed a conviction or persuasion so strong that nothing can remove
it, and this is clearly the same thing as perfect certitude (Descartes, 1963-73, 2: 569-70).
Scepticism is thus vanquished, not by necessary arguments, but by an irresistible subjective
conviction that is objectively self-validating.
A suspicion that there is something reminiscent of Calvinism both in Descartes' evil
genius and in his intuitionism can draw support from R. H. Popkin's assertion of structural
parallels between the arguments of the Meditations and Calvin's understanding of the
nature of religious knowledge. In Popkin's words, The same mental event in which [the
Calvinist] gains his assurance somehow transcends itself and reveals to him God, the
source of the event, who then guarantees that the content of the event, the religious truths,
are not only personal beliefs, but also truths that He has ordained. In an analogous way,
The cogito leads us to the rule of truth, the rule to God, and God provides the objective
assurance of our subjective certitude. Having started on the way to truth by experiencing
the illumination of the cogito, one ends by realizing that the indubitability of all clear and
distinct ideas is not only a psychological fact that one accepts and lives with, but is a Godordained fact, and hence objectively true (Popkin, 190-91).
However, the analogy is not complete, for Descartes' act of faith follows, not the
Calvinist's admission of total helplessness, but rather a proclamation of irreducible
autonomy. He does not throw himself upon God's mercy; rather, he demonstrates that
even the evil genius whom in the First Meditation he substitutes for the notion of a
possibly deceptive deity could not deprive him of one basic truthand his defiance of this
demon is a kind of exorcism.
The dreams of November 1619 contained a similar element of exorcism. Unhappy
consciences, Calvin wrote, find no rest from being troubled and tossed by a terrible

47
whirlwind... (Calvin, 1960, 2: 1007-08 [III. xxv. 12). But Descartes' willed fulfilment of a
Hermetic paradigm of regeneration enabled him to confront and to transcend a similar
challenge to his autonomy: having resisted the wind which spun him around like a top, he
was granted a revelation by the Spirit of Truth.
Appropriately enough, given Descartes' interest in fables, this interweaving of
motifs derived from Hermetism and from Calvinism is itself anticipated by the culminative
Renaissance version of a fable which originated in the sixteenth century (and which in its
canonical post-Enlightenment versions has become a vehicle for explorations of the
dilemmas of subjectivity in the modern era). I refer to the legend of Faustus, which
Descartes could have encountered in his youth in Palma Cayet's French translation of the
German Faustbookand, in particular, to Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, a play
which Descartes is most unlikely to have encountered in any form.
Marlowe's Faustus proclaims his affiliations in the first scene of the play when he
expresses his desire to be as cunning as Agrippa was, / Whose shadowes made all Europe
honor him (Marlowe, 1968, A: 150-51).59 In what might seem to be an exaggerated
anticipation of Part I of the Discourse on Method, but is more clearly a parody of
Agrippa's attempted demolition of all forms of human knowledge in De vanitate, Faustus
dismisses the academic disciplines he has mastered (Philosophy is odious and obscure, /
Both Law and Physicke are for pettie wits, and Divinitie is Unpleasant, harsh,
contemptible and vilde [Marlowe, 1968, A: 139-42]), and turns instead to magic, which
he praises in terms reminiscent of the more enthusiastic chapters of De occulta
philosophia:
O what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honor, of omnipotence
Is promised to the studious Artizan?
Quotations from this play are identified by the text cited (A refers to the text of
1604, and B to that of 1616) and by line numbers. The shadowes alluded to in A:
151 are usually taken to refer to the spirits of the dead raised in necromancy.
59

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All things that moove betweene the quiet poles
Shalbe at my commaund.... (Marlowe, 1968, A: 83-7)
The extent to which this trajectory parallels the path that led Descartes from a
rejection of all the opinions to which I had hitherto assented (Descartes, 1963-73, 1:
581) to a method which promises to make us masters and possessors of nature
(Descartes, 1973, 1: 119; cf. Descartes, 1963-73, 1: 634) should not be exaggerated. This
stage magician, however, confronts a challenge to his autonomy which is closely
analogous to the problem of overdetermination faced by Descartes in 1619. The key
moment in his turn to magic (and to the invocation of his evil genius Mephastophilis) is a
passage, packed with Calvinistic overtones, in which Faustus finds in the New Testament
an iron doctrine of necessity that condemns him to everlasting death (Marlowe, 1968, A:
76).60 Magic, which at certain points in the play acquires clear Hermetic resonances (cf.
Marlowe, 1991, xlv-xlvi), is thus for Faustus a response to despair, and a despairing
assertion of autonomy and self-determination: A sound Magitian is a Demi-god, / Here
tire my braines to get a Deity (Marlowe, 1968, B: 88-89). The futility of this stance is
made evident when, in the play's final scene, Faustus finds himself so thoroughly
permeated by external agencies that he cannot make even the gestures of penitence:
. . . ah my God, I woulde weepe, but the divel drawes in my teares,
gush foorth bloud, instead of teares, yea life and soule, Oh he stayes
my tong, I would lift up my hands, but see, they hold them, they hold
them. (Marlowe, 1968, A: 1416-20)
Like Descartes' dreams, the play contains a scene of reading; in this case, however,
the act of reading appears to be overdetermined, and guided not by the Spirit of
Truth but rather by demonic powersa notion made explicit in lines added to the
play early in the seventeenth century in which Faustus learns from his attendant
For analyses of the interweaving of Hermetic and Calvinistic motifs in this play,
see Keefer, 1985-86 and 1987, and Marlowe, 1991, xlv-lv, 181-211.
60

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spirit that even his initial dismissal of Christian theology was not an autonomous
act:
'Twas I, that when thou wer't i'the way to heaven,
Damb'd up thy passage, when thou took'st the booke,
To view the Scriptures, then I turn'd the leaves
And led thine eye. (Marlowe, 1968, B: 1989-92)
Even if he never encountered any form of this fable, Descartes might be said to
have effectively revised it: confronting the manipulations of his evil spirit at the beginning
of his itinerary, he subsequently integrated them into an argument designed to provide a
firm metaphysical footing for an autonomous subjectivity.
However, his contemporaries, among them Meric Casaubon, son of the Isaac
Casaubon who in 1614 had dated the Hermetica, were not uniformly impressed with the
resulting rationalism.61 In A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme (1655), Meric Casaubon
ranked Descartes' philosophy with the Mysticall Theology of Numa Pompilius and
Minos, who, to make their law received as oracles, did their best to perswade, that they
did not come by them as other men did theirs, but that they were the fruits of Caves and
darknesse... (Casaubon, 172-73; qtd. in Spiller, 19-20). And in an unpublished text
written in the late 1660sa quarter-century still before the publication of Baillet's
biography revealed the details of Descartes' meditations in November 1619the younger
Casaubon returned to the attack: ... for his Method: I took him for one whome excessive
pride and self-conceit (which doth happen unto many) had absolutly bereaved of his
witts.... A cracked brain man, an Enthusiast I took him to be... (Spiller, 21). Meric
Casaubon's writings do not, on the whole, give evidence of unusual perspicuity. But in
recognizing Descartes' method as a product of 'enthusiasm,' he had identified a feature of it
In one respect at least, the son followed in his father's footsteps: Isaac had
exploded the reputation of Hermes; Meric did the same for Dr. John Dee, the English
Hermetist, mathematician and magus, when in 1659 he published a large part of
Dee's spiritual diaries.
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that has been largely neglected by modern readers of the Discourse on Method and the
Meditations.
Casaubon's contemptuous identification of 'enthusiasm' with folly or madness (the
latter deprived, quite clearly, of the heroic resonances given it by Ficino and other
Renaissance interpreters of Plato) is very much a reflex of his timewhich was the time,
also, of Butler's Hudibras and of Henry More's polemics against 'enthusiasm.' But another
more interesting and less dismissive understanding of the relation between reason and
madness in the philosophy of Descartes has recently become available. I am thinking,
again, of Jacques Derridathis time of the well-known essay Cogito and the History of
Madness, in which he has this to say of Descartes' Evil Genius hypothesis and its
resolution in the 'cogito':
The hyperbolical audacity of the Cartesian Cogito, its mad
audacity, which we perhaps no longer perceive as such because,
unlike Descartes' contemporary, we are too well assured of ourselves
and too well accustomed to the framework of the Cogito, rather than
to the critical experience of itits mad audacity would consist in the
return to an original point which no longer belongs to either a
determined reason or a determined unreason, no longer belongs to
them as opposition or alternative. Whether I am mad or not, Cogito,
sum .... for even if the totality of what I think is imbued with
falsehood or madness, even if the totality of the world does not exist,
even if nonmeaning has invaded the totality of the world, up to and
including the very contents of my thought, I still think, I am while I
think. Even if I do not in fact grasp the totality, if I neither
understand nor embrace it, I still formulate the project of doing so,
and this project is meaningful in such a way that it can be defined
only in relation to a precomprehension of the infinite and

51
undetermined totality. This is why, by virtue of this margin of the
possible, the principled, and the meaningful, which exceeds all that is
real, factual, and existent, this project is mad, and acknowledges
madness as its liberty and its very possibility. (Derrida, 1978, 56)
Despite my invocation of Derrida at the beginning and end of this essay, it should
be apparent that the itinerary of this essay is not a Derridean one. For that philosopher,
though claiming to locate the very historicity of philosophy in what he describes as a
dialogue between hyperbole of the kind exemplified by the Cogito and determined
historical structures, at the same time maintains that the Cartesian hyperbole cannot be
enclosed in a factual and determined historical structure, for it is the project of exceeding
every finite and determined totality (Derrida, 1978, 60).
My argument is a quite different one. For while in identifying the indebtedness of
this dreamer's path to the discourses of Hermetism and of Calvinism I would not want to
obscure the sense in which his thinking remains (to borrow the words of Walter Benjamin)
a leap in the open air of history (Benjamin, 1973, 263), I hope to have shown that it is
most precisely in the pivotal hyperbolic gestures of his thought that Descartes makes
manifest his participation in a particular historical moment.
It is only, I think, in historical terms that one can begin to appreciate the multiple
ironies of the Cartesian itinerary. A century before Descartes, the magus Cornelius Agrippa
hoped all his life for a miraculous illumination that he never received; nor did Michel de
Montaigne claim to have received the illumination that he thought possible. Descartes,
however, had in 1619 rendered his mind bare and nakedand had indeed received from
above a guarantee of truth and certainty. A fitting reward, presumably, for his belief that
the writings of poets, since they are inspired by enthusiasm and the force of imagination,
contain profounder thoughts than those of the philosophers.

52

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