“Whoever has well comprised (says Descartes in contravention of the doctrine of Regius, that all our common notions owe their origin to observation and tradition), the extent and limits of our senses, and what precisely by their means can reach our faculty of thinking, must admit that no idea or objects are represented to us by them such as we form them by thought; so that there is nothing in our ideas that is not natural to the mind or to the faculty of thinking which it possesses, if we but except certain circumstances that pertain only to experience; for example, it is experience alone that leads us to judge that such and such ideas, which are now present to the mind, are related to certain objects that are out of us; not in truth that those things transmitted them into our mind by the organs of the senses such as we perceive them; but because they transmitted something which gave occasion to our mind, by the natural faculty it possesses, to form them at that time rather than at another. For, as our author himself avers in article 19, in accordance with the doctrine of my Principles, nothing can come from external objects to our mind by the medium of the senses, except certain corporeal movements; but neither these movements themselves nor the figures arising from them, are conceived by us such as they are in the organs of sense, as I have amply explained in the Dioptrics: whence it follows that even the ideas of motion and figures are naturally in us. And much more the ideas of pain, colours, sounds, and of other similar things, must be natural to us, to the end that our mind, on occasion of certain corporeal movements, with which they have no resemblance, may be able to represent them to itself.”—Remarks on the Programme of Regius, Ep. P. I xcix (Ed. 1668), or tom. IV Lett. XXXVIII of Garnier’s Ed.
“Finally, I hold that all those (ideas) which involve no negation or affirmation, are innate in us, for the organs of the senses convey nothing to us of the same character as the idea which is formed on occasion of them, and thus the idea must have been previously in us.”—Ep. P. II lv, or Garnier’s Ed. tom. IV Lett. LXIX.
“Whence do we know that the sky exists? Is it because we see it? But this vision does not affect the mind unless in so far as it is an idea, and an idea inhering in the mind itself, and not an image depicted on the fantasy.”—App. Ax. 5, p. 233.
“I hold that there is no other difference between the mind and its ideas than between a piece of wax and the diverse figures of which it is capable. And since the receiving diverse figures is not properly an action in the wax, but a passion; so it seems to me to be also a passion in the mind that it receives this or that idea; and I consider that except its volitions it has no actions, but that its ideas are induced upon it, partly by objects affecting the senses, partly by the impressions that are in the brain, and partly also by the dispositions which have gone before in the mind itself, and by the movements of its will.”—Ep. P. I CXV.
“The mind always receives these (its perceptions) from the things represented by them.”—De Pass., part I, art. 17.
Among Cartesians, compare De la Forge, De l’Esprit de l’Homme, cap. X. Geulincx, Dictata in Prin. Phil. P. IV § 189. Malebranche, Recherche de la Vérité, Liv. II; De l’Imagination, chap. V § 1; also Liv. I. Des Sens, chap. X § 5.
I am aware that some maintain that Descartes held the material impression to be an object of consciousness, an opinion to which both Reid and Stewart incline (see Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers; essay II, chap. VIII; Stewart’s Dissertation, Note N. p. 245; Elements, part I, chap. I, note, p. 45, ed. 1850). That such is not the doctrine of Descartes, is manifest from the passages already cited. It may be necessary, however, in order to a fuller consideration of the question, to refer to those doubtful statements which at first sight appear to give some countenance to the supposition.
I shall, first of all, quote and give
