ABSTRACT
Descartes’ Le Monde is more original than any of his other works – more original at any rate than the Principia, in which he adopts a framework which it would be more logical for him to reject. First of all, Le Monde is composed on an interesting plan. As Descartes explains in the Discours, it started with ‘quite a full’ exposition of what he understood about light. Then, ‘as the occasion arose’, he added ‘something about the sun and fixed stars, because almost all light comes from them; about the heavens, because they transmit light; about planets, comets and the earth, because they reflect light; about terrestrial bodies in particular because they are either coloured or transparent or luminous; and finally about man, because he observes them’.1 The scope of the treatise, therefore, was traditional but, in so far as all things were organised around the theme of light, the presentation was novel. The second original feature of Le Monde is that Descartes asks his readers to ‘lose sight of all the creatures that God made five or six thousand years ago’ and ‘suppose that God creates anew so much matter all around us that in whatever direction our imagination may extend it no longer perceives any place which is empty’.2 In the Discours the same is formulated as an invitation to ‘leave our world wholly for them [‘the learned’] to argue about and to speak solely of what would happen in a new world’.3 Physics starts neither with experience nor with a review of existing opinions, but with an exercise of the imagination: ‘Allow your thought to wander beyond this world to view another world – a wholly new one which I shall bring into being before your mind in imaginary spaces.’4
