Discours de la Methode pour bien conduire sa Raison, & chercher la Verité dans les Sciences. Plus la Dioptrique, les Meteores, et la Geometrie. Qui sont des essais de cete Methode.
Leiden: Jan Maire, 1637. First edition of the founding text of modern philosophy, in a strictly contemporary Parisian armorial binding bearing the gilt quartered arms of Louis Hesselin (1602–1662) — maître ordinaire de la Chambre aux deniers, conseiller du Roi, and surintendant des plaisirs du Roi, choreographer of the court ballets in which the young Louis XIV learned to dance, builder (with Le Vau) of the most admired cabinet de curiosités on the Île Saint-Louis, host at Chantemesle to John Evelyn and to Queen Christina of Sweden. The juxtaposition is not trivial. Descartes in 1637 had withdrawn from court life to the Netherlands, published his method anonymously, and suppressed its cosmological foundations after the condemnation of Galileo. Hesselin in the same decade was choreographing the court ballets in which the young Louis XIV would learn to dance. Two volumes of seventeenth-century French culture — the austere philosophical method, and the courtly spectacle — are bound here into a single object. Contemporary armorial copies of the Discours with named aristocratic descent are the rarest form in which the book survives; a copy traceable by inscription through six named hands across two and a half centuries is effectively without parallel in the modern trade. The Discours is a book that exists only because a larger one could not be. Descartes had been writing Le Monde since October 1629 — a comprehensive natural philosophy founded on the heliocentric hypothesis and designed as his magnum opus, treating everything he believed he knew about material nature: light, the Sun and fixed stars, the heavens, the planets and comets, the Earth, terrestrial bodies, and finally man observing them. The condemnation of Galileo in June 1633 arrested it. Galileo’s fate was a legal warning Descartes took seriously: in letters to Mersenne through the autumn of 1633 and spring of 1634 he described the Roman decision as theologically unfounded and politically menacing, and hoped it would be reversed so that Le Monde could be published without fear of censure. It would not be, in his lifetime. He salvaged from the unpublishable work the portions that were theologically survivable — the geometrical optics, the meteorology, and the analytic geometry — and released them four years later as three Essais with a hastily composed methodological preface, anonymously, in Leiden. Posterity has inverted the book’s original proportions. What Descartes wrote and conceived as a preface to his science is now read as one of the canonical texts of Western philosophy, while the three Essais it was meant to introduce have lapsed, in the modern handbooks, into what are routinely called its appendices. Yet the Géométrie contains the birth of analytic or coordinate geometry, which Florian Cajori called ‘of epoch-making importance’ (History of Mathematics, p. 174) and which John Stuart Mill named ‘the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences’ (An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, 1865). It, in A. R. Hall’s phrase, ‘rendered possible the later achievements of seventeenth-century mathematical physics’ (Nature and Nature’s Laws, 1970, p. 91). The Dioptrique states the sine law of refraction independently of the Leiden mathematician Willebrord Snellius; the Météores gives the first geometrically correct explanation of the rainbow. The foundations of seventeenth-century mathematical physics are here, released only because the cosmological framework that would have carried them had been made politically unpublishable by the Galileo affair. The Dioptrique, the first of the three Essais, opens with a mathematical analysis of reflection and refraction. Descartes demonstrates that the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection and derives the sine law of refraction — the same conclusion reached independently around 1621 by Snellius, whose unpublished work Descartes may or may not have known, and whose priority has generated a four-century controversy of which Descartes’ published statement is the first public trace. The third discourse contains a cross-sectional description of the human eye, written without recourse to the technical vocabulary of iris, pupil, or optical lens, but with enough detail to support the analysis of vision that follows, and evidently drawing on Descartes’ own anatomical dissections during his Amsterdam years. The fourth, fifth, and sixth discourses develop a philosophical account of perception that anticipates the Meditations: it is the mind that senses, not the body, or rather the mind in the brain, exercising what Descartes calls the sens commun; nerves transmit information through the motion of their inner filaments; there need be no pictorial resemblance between the retinal image and the idea the soul forms of the object. The text closes with a long discussion of lens-grinding, in which Descartes argues that hyperbolic and elliptical sections are to be preferred to any others for optical instruments — an ingenious if impractical recommendation that Huygens was to pursue over the decade that followed. The Météores treats the phenomena of the atmosphere — winds, clouds, rain, hail, snow, lunar and solar haloes, parhelia — with the stated polemical aim of displacing the language of omens and prodigies from meteorology. Much of what is explained derives from specific experiences Descartes dates from his own observation: the shapes of snowflakes seen at Amsterdam in the winter of 1635, the avalanches he watched when crossing the Alps in May 1625, the coronas around a lighted candle seen while crossing the Zuiderzee, and the parhelia observed at Rome in March 1629. The centrepiece, however, is Descartes’ explanation of the rainbow, which depends on the sine law established in the Dioptrique. A ray of light striking a raindrop, he proposes, undergoes two refractions (on entering and leaving the drop) and one internal reflection; for rays passing through many raindrops at the requisite angle to the Sun, the cumulative geometry yields the bow. A secondary bow — fainter, with the colour order reversed — results from two internal reflections rather than one. The physical account of colour itself rests on the assumption that light is a tendency to motion impressed by the Sun on a subtle medium, with colour arising from rotational changes in the medium’s particles — a hypothesis Descartes was already willing to call provisional in correspondence, and which later proved wide of the mark. The geometrical construction of the bow, however, is essentially correct, and stands, with Newton’s later prismatic supplement on the origin of colours, as the foundation of the modern theory. The Géométrie had been partly written while the Météores was already at press, and Descartes warned in a preliminary Avertissement that it presupposed a mathematical training the rest of the book did not require. His interest in geometry had been stimulated in 1631 when Jacob Golius, professor of mathematics and oriental languages at Leiden, sent him the Pappus problem of three or four lines — a problem solved by the ancients, whose solution was lost, which became the test case that runs through the Géométrie. Book One demonstrates that every arithmetical operation — addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and root extraction — admits of a geometrical interpretation, and introduces the exponential notation x², x³ in place of the cumbersome cossic abbreviations of the older algebra. The move from old notation to new marks what Niccolò Guicciardini has called a ‘gigantic innovation’ (Isaac Newton on Mathematical Certainty and Method, p. 38), tightening the connection between algebra and geometry in a way that made their unified treatment for the first time possible. Descartes applies the apparatus to the Pappus problem and solves not only the four-line case but generalises to the n-line case the ancient geometers had left open. Book Two develops the distinction between geometric and mechanical curves — curves of well-defined algebraic degree against the conchoids, spirals, and quadratrices the Greeks had grouped as linear — and the supremacy of the algebraic criterion becomes thereafter canonical: Newton extends the classification to fractional and irrational exponents, Leibniz to variable or transcendental exponents. Book Three treats the theory of equations and the geometrical construction of their roots, gathering results partly due to Cardano, Harriot, and Girard and setting them out for the first time in modern notation, in an exposition Newton would take up and extend in the Arithmetica universalis (1707) and the De limitibus aequationum. It includes the celebrated rule of signs — the maximum number of positive and negative roots of an equation is given by the alternations and permanences of sign among its coefficients — asserted without proof in 1637 and rigorously demonstrated only in the eighteenth century. The Discours that introduces these three essays was itself written last, and hastily, while the book was already going through Maire’s press. It had been conceived as a brief preface and expanded under Mersenne’s importunate pressure into an autobiographical method-manifesto. Its six parts move from autobiography to method (the four famous rules), through the provisional moral code, to the metaphysical core — the cogito, ergo sum of Part IV, with its argument from the certainty of the thinking subject to the existence of God and thence to the reliability of clear and distinct ideas — and finally to the long and pointedly apologetic Part VI on publication, in which Descartes explains why he has not released the full physics: the theories in the Essais, he concedes, are presented as suppositions which could have been argued more certainly if Le Monde had appeared. It is as close as the 1637 book comes to naming the cosmological ghost in its own machinery. Printing and the Mind of Man summarised the whole in terms still close to Descartes’ own: he had set out to find the simple indestructible proposition that gives to the universe and to thought their order and system, and what he offered — the truth of thought when true to itself, the elevation of the partial state of finite consciousness to the infinite existence of God, and the reduction of the material universe to extension and local motion — became the starting-point from which the whole of subsequent Western philosophy has proceeded. Descartes’ preference for French over the scholarly Latin of the universities was itself a polemical choice: he wished to dissociate his work from the scholastic tradition that it criticised, and trusted readers (including women, he conceded) who had not been contaminated by school learning more than academic readers — a position that later became one of the central features of Cartesian arguments for women’s education. Maire’s printing ran from mid-1636 through to early summer 1637. Descartes had initially approached the Elzeviers at Leiden, but they raised many difficulties and assumed, since the prospective author had travelled so far to petition their services, that he had little choice but to accept their terms. This bargaining strategy failed, and Descartes moved to Maire in the same town, who housed the young Frans van Schooten — the son of a Leiden professor of mathematics of the same name — under his own roof to ensure the engravings were completed on time, partly from an editor’s concern for quality and partly from a publisher’s fear that van Schooten would escape. By 13 July 1636 the printer was promising to have all the illustrations ready within three weeks and to begin printing immediately, and the Dioptrique was pulled by 30 October, but the engravings for the other two Essais deferred publication to Easter 1637. The Dutch privilege was granted on 20 December 1636; the French privilege — needed because the book was in French and Maire required protection against Parisian piracy — was delayed by difficult negotiations in which Huygens and Mersenne eventually had to intervene, and was finally issued on 4 May 1637. Maire pulled the final sheet on 8 June. Descartes’ name appears nowhere on the title-page, and the French privilege as printed was abridged to omit it. His anonymity at publication was deliberate, and of a piece with the decision to withhold the underlying physics. The armorial binding on this copy carries the quartered arms of Cauchon and Hesselin in gilt at the centres, with alternating griffin and fleur-de-lys cross tools in the spine compartments — both charges diagnostic of the family (Guigard, Nouvel armorial du bibliophile, 1890, II, pp. 259–260; Olivier, Hermal & Roton, Manuel de l’amateur de reliures armoriées françaises, XVII, no. 1687). Louis Hesselin — christened Louis Cauchon, and authorised by lettres patentes of Louis XIII, registered in the Parlement of Paris on 19 December 1626, to adopt the surname of a childless great-uncle whose estate he inherited — was born in 1602 into a Champagne family of royal officiers. As maître ordinaire of the Chambre aux deniers, conseiller du Roi, and, from about 1655, surintendant des plaisirs du Roi, he was the producer of the young Louis XIV’s court ballets, himself dancing in the Ballet des fêtes de Bacchus of May 1651 alongside the thirteen-year-old king. He travelled twice to Italy in the 1630s — to Venice and Florence in 1631–33, and to Venice and Rome in 1636–37 — returning with paintings, objets d’art, and optical instruments, and maintaining thereafter his collecting networks with Tinelli in Venice, Torelli and Della Bella in Florence, and the natural philosopher and perspectivist Jean-François Niceron in Rome. The Le Vau-designed hôtel he commissioned on the Île Saint-Louis, built between 1640 and 1644 at what is now 24 quai de Béthune, housed the most admired cabinet of seventeenth-century Paris; Father Niceron, writing in the 1630s, described it in effect as a compendium of all the Parisian cabinets, so densely filled with rarities, paintings and books that the whole house was indistinguishable from its cabinet. At his country residence, Chantemesle, near Essonnes on the Paris–Fontainebleau road, Le Vau built the first salle à l’italienne in France, where Hesselin received John Evelyn in 1644 and, in 1656, Queen Christina of Sweden — the sovereign whose insistence on early-morning philosophy lessons in an unheated Stockholm library had killed Descartes four years earlier. Hesselin died on 8 August 1662 in his Paris hôtel. The pose of seals and the inventory after his death are documented in the Archives nationales (Y 11111) and the Minutier central (XX/310), and ground R. de Crèvecoeur’s 1895 monograph and Moana Weil-Curiel’s 2001 thèse de doctorat at the École pratique des hautes études, the fullest modern treatment of his life and collections. The claim, repeated from Bonnaffé’s 1884 Dictionnaire des amateurs français au XVIIe siècle, that he died poisoned by a servant — elsewhere embroidered into a story of death by indigestion after consuming 294 walnuts on a wager — is a nineteenth-century embellishment for which the archival record provides no support. The form of the surname he himself used, and on the arms as struck, is simply Louis Hesselin: the form he signed, the form recorded in the official records, and the form under which he is known in every art-historical source. His library was dispersed six years after his death. The note on the rear paste-down of the present copy, ‘achepté a Paris de la bibliotheque de Mr Hesselin 1668’, is one of the scant direct witnesses to that dispersal. No printed auction catalogue was ever issued; none is recorded in Frits Lugt’s Répertoire des catalogues de ventes publiques, comprehensive for France from 1600. This is consistent with the state of the Parisian book trade at that date — the earliest Paris book auctions for which catalogues survive being those of Mentel in 1669 and Marescot in 1673, themselves on the very threshold of the auction catalogue’s emergence as a medium. Hesselin’s books were therefore sold privately, à l’amiable, through one or more Paris booksellers in the years immediately after his death; Bonnaffé, writing in 1884, already found them ‘difficiles à trouver’. From 1668 onwards the book’s history belongs to the diocese of Orléans. Its next owner was Jacques Borde, priest of the diocese of Orléans and canon of the Collégiale Saint-Liphard de Meung-sur-Loire, who signed twice — Ex Libris J. Borde Presbyt. Aurel. Canon. Magdun. 1673 on the rear paste-down and, in a larger freer hand, on the front paste-down — just five years after the Hesselin purchase. A family connection is plausible: Hesselin’s first cousin was named Henry Godet des Bordes, and the surname Borde recurs in the Champenois branches of the Cauchon network. The next mark, on the title-page and once on the inside cover, cancelled, is that of Petrus Anianus Douberion; the forename Anianus (French Anien) is that of the fifth-century bishop-saint who defended Orléans against Attila in 451, used almost exclusively by Orléanais families. The third Orléans owner, the rhetoric-professor Jean-Baptiste Amy-Demeré — whose surname has long been misread in the dealer literature as Amici Deméré, which is in fact the Latin genitive of its first element — is the most fully documented. Trained by the Sulpicians at the Orléans petit séminaire, ordained priest, and having taken a baccalauréat in law, he won by competitive examination in December 1775 the chair of troisième at the Collège royal d’Orléans — the former Jesuit foundation, which had passed to secular masters after the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1762 — presenting on Cicero, Horace, and Tacitus. He was promoted to the chair of rhetoric in 1785 (L.-H. Tranchau, Le Collège et le Lycée d’Orléans, 1762–1892, 1893, p. 146), which is precisely the title he claims in the note on the front paste-down: Ex libris Joannis Baptistae Amici Demeré Presbyteri, in Collegio Aureliansi Rhetoricae Professoris, An. 1792. The Collège itself closed in the Revolution and re-emerged only as the École centrale of the Loiret in 1796; Amy-Demeré’s post-1792 fate is undocumented, though his Sulpician formation makes a refractory, non-juring stance the likelier hypothesis. The blank facing the title-page carries an eighteenth-century French manuscript note in a trained rhetorician’s hand, opening with the claim that ‘Le seul discours de la méthode eut suffi pour immortaliser son auteur’, developing a mine-and-quarry metaphor for the inexhaustible richness of the work — that the more one excavates the more riches one discovers, although the exploitation of the seam is not given to every reader — and closing with the Virgilian tag ‘hoc opus, hic labor est’. The note is not an original composition but a paraphrase of Antoine-Léonard Thomas’s Éloge de René Descartes, which won the Académie française prize in 1765 and became the most quoted eighteenth-century appreciation of the philosopher — Victor Cousin reprinted it in his 1824 edition of Descartes’ Œuvres philosophiques. Thomas, writing specifically of the Dioptrique, calls it one of the finest monuments of its author, qui suffiroit seul pour l’immortaliser. The annotator lifts the distinctive construction and re-applies it, with greater justice, to the Discours itself. The Latin tag is from Virgil, Aeneid VI.129 — the Sibyl’s warning to Aeneas that descending to the underworld is easy but returning from it is the task and the labour. The combination — a paraphrase of the most-read French éloge of Descartes, a Virgilian sententia flagged in quotation marks, a developed metaphor of philosophical inheritance framed in rhetorical symmetry — is the professional signature of a Latin-trained professor rhetorices. The hand is of the late eighteenth or very early nineteenth century. The attribution to Amy-Demeré himself, in or shortly after 1792, is the economical hypothesis: the textbook Thomas, the Virgilian tag, and the rounded French periodicity all match what one would expect of a professor of rhetoric at an ancien régime Collège, marking a first edition of modern philosophy in the season when the institution housing his chair was about to dissolve with the ancien régime itself. After 1792 the book disappears from view for most of a century, and resurfaces in the library of Eugène Paillet (1829–1901), a Paris juge d’instruction who became a conseiller at the Cour d’Appel and, more lastingly, one of the great bibliophiles of the Second Empire and Third Republic. Co-founder in 1874 of the Société des Amis des Livres and its president from 1880 until his death, Paillet was famous for reading his rare books: Roger Portalis, in his 1901 memoir Eugène Paillet; bibliophile, 1829–1901, records that visitors to the Sunday afternoons at the rue de Berlin would find him volume in hand — the original edition of Descartes’ Discours or, alternatively, Rabelais. The anecdote almost certainly refers to the present copy, which Paillet had already furnished with his Greek leather book-label, ἐκ βιβλιον Ευγενιου Παιλλη, mounted on the rear paste-down beneath an eagle in gilt. Paillet’s library was dispersed in three stages: two privately printed catalogues in 1885 and 1887 (the first collection sold to Morgand & Fatout for 500,000 francs), followed by the posthumous Catalogue des livres composant la bibliothèque de feu M. Eugène Paillet, sold by Damascène Morgand in Paris in 1902. The present copy is lot 60 of Part I. 4to (206 × 155 mm), pp. 78 [Discours]; [2], 413 [Essais], [1, Avertissement]; [34, tables, errata, French and Dutch privileges]. Woodcut printer’s device on title, woodcut initials, numerous woodcut diagrams and text illustrations. Strictly contemporary French polished veau écaille (tortoiseshell-stained calf), covers with double gilt fillet frame and the gilt quartered arms of Cauchon and Hesselin at centres; spine in six compartments with five raised bands, tooled alternately with griffins and fleur-de-lys crosses drawn from the Hesselin arms, with double gilt fillet divisions; mottled edges. Spine-ends and corners restored with matching calf, lightly rubbed, small split at head of upper joint; occasional light staining to text. Modern morocco pull-off case.
Item #5910
Price: $300,000.00
