These considerations are, I think, sufficient to show, that it is at least highly improbable, that Descartes meant in the passages quoted to allow to the mind a consciousness of the organic impression in sense and imagination. To have done so, would have been to fill his philosophy with anomalies and contradictions of the most palpable kind.
But let us attend shortly to the passages themselves, to discover whether they render such an interpretation of them imperative. In the passages quoted, the mind is said to turn itself towards the species, and these again are said to inform (informare) the mind.
With regard to the first phrase, conversion towards the species, it will be found, by a reference to the passages in which it occurs, that it is always used as descriptive of the acts of sense and imagination, when these are spoken of in contrast to the act of the pure intellect, or that faculty whose exercise is independent of all organic impression; and then the contrast indicated is in the origin or source of the ideas, or objects of these faculties, those of sense and imagination having their (remote) source in body—those of intellect, their (immediate) origin in the mind itself. In this way, all that conversion towards the species indicates, is merely that the mind does not receive certain ideas directly from itself, but is in some way dependent for at least their actual presence on certain conditions of the bodily organism. And this, it is manifest, does not necessarily imply the consciousness by the mind of the organic impression.
Again, the corporeal species may in its turn be said to inform the mind (informare mentem), inasmuch as it is to it the mental modification or idea, viewed apart from its hyperphysical origin, is immediately attached, and on occasion of which it is revealed to consciousness; and this on the law of the union of mind and body, as parts of the same whole. In the same sense, Deity is said to inform the mind, in so constituting it as that in the course of the development of its powers, the knowledge of himself should naturally arise.
But, in the second place, the species may, in a literal sense, be said to inform the mind, for the word, in its strict acceptation, merely denotes the giving a particular form or shape to a thing; and in the Cartesian phraseology, the spiritual notions or mental ideas were but the different forms of the mind in which its acts were clothed, limited, and determined.—Vide Appendix, Def. II, p. 229. De la Forge, De l’Esprit, chap. X, p. 131 and passim. Claub. Op. p. II, p. 606.
The doctrine of Descartes on this point seems to be well put by Chauvin, when, after noticing the doctrines of certain of the Peripatetics regarding species, he says:—“There are, however, among more recent philosophers, not a few who retain the nomenclature of species impressa and expressa. But with them the species impressa is nothing more than a certain motion impressed either mediately or immediately, by external objects, on the parts of the body, and thence by the nerves transmitted to the brain, or a certain commotion of the fibres of the brain, proceeding from the agitation of the animal spirits flowing in the brain; which, as they have no resemblance to the objects of nature, are esteemed representamens of these things, on no other account than because the mind on occasion of them [i.e., the motions], makes the things present to itself, and contemplates the same in its own ideas therefrom arising. …
“But the species expressa is nothing more than that notion of the mind which is expressed on the presence of the species impressa, and by attention to and inspection (intuitione) of which the thing itself is known.”—Lexicon Rationale, Species (1692). Con. Prin. of Phil., part IV §§ 189, 197, 198.
But, lastly, the whole ambiguity is probably due to the extreme timidity of the philosopher, and his anxious solicitude to bring the results of his own independent reflection into an apparent harmony with the opinions generally received in his time; which led him frequently to clothe his really new doctrines in the current forms of expression.
There is thus, not even on the special ground of the ambiguous passages themselves, any reason to suppose that Descartes ever departed from a doctrine essential to the consistency of his philosophy, viz., the non-consciousness of the organic impression. So much for idea as a material or organic modification.
We must now, however, consider idea in reference to mind, i.e., as an object of consciousness. In this relation the fundamental notion to be attached to the term, as used by Descartes and the Cartesians, is that of a representative thought, or an object of consciousness, in and by the knowledge of which we become aware of something distinct from this object itself. Idea, Descartes says, is to be taken “pro omni re cogitata quatenus habet tantum esse objectivum in intellectu.”—Diss. de Meth. P. IV note. “Idea est ipsa res cogitata quatenus est objective in intellectu.”? Again, idea is “cogitatio tanquam rei imago.”—Con. Med. III 97, and Works passim. De La Forge, De l’Esprit, chap. X pp. 128, 131.
It is necessary, however, with a view to an adequate understanding of the Cartesian philosophy, to distinguish the two aspects under which the same idea was viewed by Descartes and his followers. The mental idea, while really one and indivisible, was considered in two logically distinct relations, viz., both as an object and as a medium of knowledge, that is, in reference to the mind knowing and the object known. This distinction is made by Descartes
