Principia philosophiae.
Amsterdam: Louis Elzevier, 1644. First edition of the charter of the mechanical universe — the book in which Descartes published his complete system of nature, from the first principles of knowledge to the constitution of the heavens and the earth, and in which the laws of nature received their first systematic statement in print: that matter remains in its state of rest or motion until something changes it, and that all motion, of itself, is in a straight line. Newton absorbed both principles, and under his name the first of them still opens every textbook of physics as the first law of motion. The work is at once the boldest and the most careful book of Descartes’s life. It is the boldest because it replaces the qualities and forms of the scholastic world-picture with a single universe of matter in motion, governed everywhere by the same laws and filled with the swirling vortices that carry the planets around their suns. It is the most careful because it was engineered, clause by clause, to survive the fate of Galileo. The present copy, in untouched contemporary vellum with the title inked on the spine in an early hand, carries a mid-seventeenth-century Latin ownership inscription. The book’s genesis lies in a suppression. By 1633 Descartes had substantially completed Le Monde, his first system of the world, built openly on the motion of the earth. When news of Galileo’s condemnation reached him that November, he wrote to Mersenne that he had been so astonished that he was “almost resolved to burn all my papers” — or at least to let no one see them — for if the earth’s motion were false, he confessed, then so were all the foundations of his philosophy. Le Monde was suppressed, and remained suppressed until 1664, fourteen years after its author’s death. But Descartes did not abandon the system; he spent the following decade re-engineering it. The instrument of survival was his doctrine of the relativity of motion: motion, properly defined, is the transference of a body from the vicinity of the bodies immediately touching it, and by that definition a body carried along inside a moving medium — a passenger asleep in the hold of a ship — is, properly speaking, at rest. Upon that foundation a Copernican cosmology could be rebuilt in a form whose letter no censor could condemn, and the Principia philosophiae is precisely that rebuilding: the suppressed world-system of 1633, re-founded, expanded, armoured in scholastic form, and published. The ambition was frankly institutional. Descartes wanted a textbook — a book that could be taught in the universities and even in the Jesuit colleges in which he had himself been educated; he procured the standard scholastic Summa of Eustachius a Sancto Paulo with a view to setting out his own system against it, and he planned the work in six parts, of which the two last, on living things and on man, were never completed. The four finished parts were printed by Louis Elzevier at Amsterdam in 1644, in numbered articles with running marginal summaries in the schools’ own manner, under a privilege printed at the head of the preliminaries. In the same year and from the same house appeared the Specimina philosophiae, the Latin translation of the Discours with the Dioptrique and Météores — a separately signed, separately paginated and separately privileged book, in whose pages the catch-phrase cogito, ergo sum first appears in its canonical Latin form, and with which the Principia is often found bound, since Descartes distributed the two together as the Latin corpus of his philosophy. The dedication is to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, the exiled Palatine princess with whom Descartes had been corresponding since 1643, and it was earned rather than ornamental: Elisabeth answered the gift with pointed criticisms of the book’s accounts of magnetic attraction and of the heaviness of mercury, and their exchange, pursued to the end of his life, drew from him his last book, on the passions of the soul. When the abbé Claude Picot’s French translation appeared in 1647, revised by the author, Descartes prefaced it with the celebrated letter figuring all philosophy as a tree — metaphysics the roots, physics the trunk, and the useful sciences of medicine, mechanics and morals the branches — the clearest statement he ever gave of what the Principia was for. The system unfolds deductively. Part I restates the metaphysics in textbook order — the resolve to doubt once in life all that can be doubted, the indubitability of the thinking self, God as the guarantor that clear and distinct perception does not deceive — not for its own sake but as the foundation on which a physics may safely rest. Part II then erects the physics. The essence of matter is extension alone: whatever is extended is matter, so that there is no void, no atom, and no limit to the divisibility of body; the world is a plenum, and all apparent attraction and all apparent action at a distance must resolve into contact and pressure. Motion was impressed on this matter by God at the creation in a fixed quantity, and because God is immutable, that quantity is conserved — the first conservation principle of modern science, derived not from experiment but from the divine nature. What a later century would call the deepest structural commitments of classical physics — laws holding everywhere and always, a conserved quantity underwriting them — enter the printed literature here, as theology. From the conservation of motion flow the laws of nature. The first declares that each thing, so far as in it lies, perseveres in its state, so that “when it is once moved, it always continues to move” — rest and motion made equally natural, neither requiring a cause beyond itself. The second declares that all motion, of itself, is along straight lines — the rectilinear principle that goes decisively beyond Galileo, for whom persistent motion had remained tied to the circle of the earth’s surface. The third governs the exchange of motion in collision, which Descartes works out in seven rules of impact whose ambition outran their truth: the notorious fourth rule holds that a smaller body, however fast, can never move a larger one at rest, and throughout the rules motion is reckoned by speed alone rather than directed velocity, so that Cartesian conservation falls just short of the modern conservation of momentum. Even the priority of the printed principle was contested ground — Gassendi had published an enunciation of inertia before him — but it was here, embedded in a complete deductive system rather than scattered as an insight, that the law passed into European physics; it was from here that Huygens set out when he rebuilt the rules of impact a generation later, and from here that Newton, reading critically, took the principle he would place at the head of his own axioms. Part III builds the heavens. The universe is an indefinite plenum divided into contiguous whirlpools of celestial matter, each vortex carrying a star at its centre. Matter comes in three elements — the fine scrapings that constitute the luminous suns, the round globules of the transparent heavens, and the gross ill-shaped matter of planets and comets — and light itself is nothing but the pressure of the second element, propagated outward from the whirling suns through the contiguous globules of the sky. The famous woodcut of the contiguous vortices, present in this copy at p. 78, is the first picture of a mechanist cosmos: sun-centred whirlpools packed edge to edge to fill all space, with a wandering comet threading its way between them. Planets settle into stable orbits, the less massive riding nearer the centre; a planet like the earth acquires its diurnal spin from the celestial matter flowing faster on one of its sides than the other, and that spin sets up the small subordinate vortex in which its moon is carried — a mechanical cosmogony without precedent in the printed astronomy of its century. And it is in Part III that Descartes performs the manoeuvre for which the whole book had been engineered. Since motion is transference from the neighbourhood of contiguous bodies, and since the earth is embedded at rest in the band of celestial matter that carries it, the earth — properly speaking — does not move: “The Earth, properly speaking, is not moved, nor are any of the Planets,” though all are borne along by their heaven. The diagram at p. 185 of the present copy shows the device in a single image: the earth at the centre of its own small vortex, which carries the moon around it, the whole swept bodily around the sun in the great vortex whose centre is S. Copernican astronomy is thereby retained entire — with the diurnal rotation and the annual orbit both delivered by the machinery — while the proposition condemned in Galileo is, in the letter, denied. Contemporaries read it exactly as intended: the system could be taught. Part IV brings the machine down to earth. Mountains, seas, tides, air, fire and minerals are generated from the three elements by pressure and motion; gravity itself is not an attraction but a pushing, the excess centrifugal tendency of the celestial matter recirculating through the earth’s vortex driving gross bodies toward the centre; heat and fire are the agitation of particles, illustrated by the woodcut hands striking sparks from flint at p. 237 of this copy. The part culminates in what has justly been called the first scientific theory of magnetism: the lodestone’s power stripped of all occult sympathy and explained by streams of screw-threaded particles that pour through the earth from pole to pole, finding in iron the channelled pores that fit their thread — the doctrine pictured in the great diagram at p. 273, the terrestrial globe wrapped in its spiralling effluvia, one of the most reproduced scientific images of its century. The book’s woodcut apparatus — 83 figures, 21 of them full-page — carried these arguments across Europe as images: the vortices, the magnetic earth, the rainbow, the striking hands became the standard images of natural philosophy for nearly a hundred years. The reception was immediate, institutional, and violently divided — exactly as a textbook’s should be. In the Dutch universities the war had begun before publication: at Utrecht the rector Voetius had procured a formal condemnation of the new philosophy in March 1642, on the grounds that it opposed the received philosophy, unfitted students for scholastic terminology, and carried consequences contrary to orthodox theology; there followed Schoock’s book-length Admiranda methodus, Descartes’s open letter to Voetius, and a summons before the Utrecht council under threat of expulsion and the burning of his books. The Principia appeared in the middle of that quarrel, and the quarrel pursued its author: his disciple Regius published a rival Fundamenta physices in 1646, provoking Descartes’s public repudiation of him in the preface to the French translation of 1647, and the accumulating hostility of the Dutch faculties contributed to his acceptance of Queen Christina’s invitation to Stockholm in 1649, where the winter killed him. Yet the book became what it was designed to be. Cartesian physics was taught, from it and from its derivatives, in the Netherlands, France, England and Germany; Spinoza’s first book — and the only one he published under his own name — was a geometrical recasting of it (Renati Des Cartes Principiorum philosophiae, 1663); and Rohault’s Traité de physique of 1671, the great Cartesian textbook, carried the system to the century’s end and beyond — where, in Samuel Clarke’s annotated editions, it was converted footnote by Newtonian footnote into a Trojan horse for the rival system at Cambridge. Authority answered in its own idiom: Descartes’s works were placed on the Index in 1663, and the French crown prohibited the teaching of Cartesianism in the 1670s — prohibitions that measured, rather than prevented, the conquest. The deepest reader of Part II was a Cambridge undergraduate. Newton’s notebooks of 1664 already engage the Principia critically, questioning the vortices while absorbing the laws; he took from Descartes the principle of inertia in the exact generality Descartes had given it — rest and rectilinear motion as equal states — and he took equally the vortex cosmology as the thing to be destroyed. Book II of the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica of 1687 is a sustained demonstration that a planet-carrying fluid must resist the bodies it carries and cannot be reconciled with Kepler’s laws; the General Scholium added to the second edition of 1713 drives the point home against the comets, whose exceedingly regular motions “can by no means be accounted for by the hypotheses of Vortices.” Huygens, the greatest mechanist of the intervening generation, split the difference to the end of his life: he accepted Newton’s mathematics and refused an attraction that no contact could explain. France held the plenum longest. Fontenelle, perpetual secretary of the Académie des sciences and the great popularizer of the whirlpool cosmos, was still defending the vortices in print in 1752; it took Maupertuis’s Lapland expedition of 1736–37 — the earth measured oblate, as Newton required and the Cartesians denied — to tip the balance in the institution Descartes had done most to shape. Voltaire’s fourteenth English letter had already fixed the situation in a phrase: the traveller who crossed the Channel passed between a universe that was full and a universe that was empty. The present copy has the marks of its first century about it. The binding is the plain vellum of the Continental trade, the title inked on the spine in an early hand, the edges stained red — the standard dress of the scholarly quarto in the mid-seventeenth-century Netherlands, and consistent with a Dutch first home; the flyleaf inscription, a Latin name-inscription in a rapid cursive of the period of which the genitive ‘Henrici’ is the legible element, is the bare ownership formula of the Latin-literate reader the book was written to win. Notable copies confirm the pattern of its first audience: the copy in the Norman library was Descartes’s own presentation to Antonius Aemilius, professor at Utrecht and a prominent partisan of the new philosophy there, bound in the same contemporary vellum with the title inked on the spine. In commerce the Principia is more often met with the Specimina bound in; copies of the Principia alone, as here, are the less common form. With both blank leaves, unrestored and unsophisticated, this is the book as its first readers bought and shelved it. Behind the Principia philosophiae lies the scholastic cosmos of forms and qualities it was built to replace; ahead of it lies the book that took its title, its laws and its ambition and turned them against it — Newton’s Principia of 1687, which demolished the vortices with the very principle of inertia their author had first published. For the four decades between, this book was modern physics: the first complete demonstration that the universe might be a machine — matter and motion all the way up, from the sparks of a flint to the death of a star — and the proof, in its numbered scholastic articles, that the machine could be taught. References: Norman 622 — Honeyman 856 — Willems 1008 — Guibert, p. 118 — Tchemerzine IV, 297 — DSB IV, 51–65 — E. Slowik, ‘Descartes’ Physics,’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — S. Gaukroger (ed.), René Descartes: The World and Other Writings, 1998 — P. A. Pav, ‘Gassendi’s Statement of the Principle of Inertia,’ Isis 57 (1966), pp. 24–34 — J. Herivel, The Background to Newton’s Principia, 1965 — W. W. Rouse Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics, 1908. 4to (202 × 151 mm), *4 a–b4 A–Z4 2A–2Q4 (the blanks b4 and 2Q4 both present), pp. [24], 310, [2], woodcut Elzevier device on the title, 83 woodcut figures and diagrams in the text (21 of them full-page), woodcut initials, the privilege on *1r and the errata on 2Q3r (occasional light spotting, the upper sewing of gathering B detached so that the gathering is slightly loose at the head, the remaining stitching firm). Contemporary vellum, early ink lettering ‘R. DES CARTES. PRINC. PHIL.’ on the spine, text-block edges stained red (vellum lightly soiled, slight wear at the head of the spine). Early ink ownership inscription in a mid-seventeenth-century cursive hand (a Latin name-inscription, the genitive ‘Henrici’ legible, with paraph) at the head of the front flyleaf.
Item #6708
Price: $9,500.00
