Theological Origins of Modernity

184 chapter six
could uncreate them. No necessity impelled God to create eternal truths,
and they could have been created other than they are. 60 Th is realization
led to a skeptical crisis and to his formulation of the astonishing theory
of the creation of eternal truths, which undermined his original idea of a
universal science.
A second event also apparently convinced Descartes that his project
needed to be reformulated. From 1628 to 1633, Descartes sought to develop
a Copernican science that ended in a manuscript entitled Th e World. He
described this project to Mersenne in a letter of November 13, 1629 in much
the same language he had used in writing to Beeckman more than ten
years before: “Rather than explaining just one phenomenon I have decided
to explain all the phenomena of nature, that is to say, the whole of physics.”
61 He clearly hoped that this work would replace Aristotle. 62 Descartes
was about to publish the manuscript when he learned of the condemnation
of Galileo, which led him to withdraw it. He remarked in the Discourse
that he had not seen anything objectionable in Galileo’s work and therefore
became uncertain of his own judgment, but it is reasonably clear that this
explanation is a mere smokescreen for the truth that he believed Galileo to
have been unjustly condemned. 63 He consequently became convinced that
while he might be able to write and even publish his work in the relatively
free circumstances then existing in Holland, it would never be accepted
by orthodox Catholics and he might be declared heterodox himself. He
thus concluded that he could not provide an adequate foundation for his
science nor could he make it acceptable without dealing with fundamental
metaphysical and theological questions. 64
Descartes fi rst put his science before the world with the publication in
1637 of his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and
Seeking the Truth in the Sciences. Th e work was published in French rather
than Latin and was intended for a popular audience. It consisted of a discourse
or introduction to his science in which he talked about his method,
and scientifi c treatises on optics, meteorology, and geometry in which the
method was presented and demonstrated. Descartes begins the work with
the assertion that there is a kind of equality of mind that characterizes
all human beings, in that nearly every person presumes he has all of the
intelligence he needs. Th is ironic assertion is almost certainly drawn from
Montaigne’s essay “On Presumption,” but it also echoes a similar claim
made by Bacon. Th e connection to Montaigne is illuminating: it is an almost
universal characteristic of human nature that human beings think
they know when in fact their thinking is mostly muddled and misguided.
Th eir presumption leaves them prey to rhetoric (including poetry) and