Descartes and the Decay of Learning

Abstract

On July 19^th, 1668 Casaubon wrote to his friend J.G. Gravius from Cambridge, while he was drafting A Letter to Peter du Moulin , complaining to Gravius about the state of learning:

Prima mali labes a Philosophia Cartesiana, quae stultae iuventuti et novitatis avidae bonos libros excussit e minibus. Inde ad Experimenta ventum est, in quibus nunc omnis eruditio, omnis sapientia collocatur.¹

Solid reading goes out of fashion, and as experimental philosophy takes its place learning decays; the earliest contagion of the disease is from the work of Descartes. Given the simplicity of this connection in Casaubon’s mind, it is surprising that the Letter there should be only a single cursory reference to Descartes (p. 30); but this is a reappearance in shorter form of the point made on p. 21 (203) of On Learning, the manuscript treatise written the year before. Seeing that Casaubon connected Descartes with the new philosophy, we can explain some of his hostility to the latter by his dislike of the former.