DESCARTES, RENÉ DU PERRON (b. La Haye, Touraine, France, 31 March 1596; d. Stockholm, Sweden, 11 February 1650), natural philosophy, scientific method, mathematics, optics, mechanics, physiology.

    and Regius at Utrecht were among the first. Although Plempius proved relatively hostile to Cartesian ideas (his objections were not unlike those William Harvey was to raise a few years later), Regius became so enthusiastic that for a time he entered into something of a student-teacher relationship with Descartes. As their correspondence for 1641 makes clear, Regius would send his students' theses to Descartes for comment and correction. Descartes would then return them with such specific excisions of classical residues as “In the first line of the Thesis I would get rid of these words: vivifying heat.”

The intimate contact between Descartes and Regius marked the beginning of the direct influence of Cartesian ideas and modes of thought on seventeenth-century physiology. That influence was deliberately continued later, even more vigorously after Descartes's death, by such influential figures as Thomas Bartholin and Nicholas Steno. These men, especially Steno, tried to wed the Cartesian method of mechanistic explanation to careful anatomical investigation. Steno was particularly highly regarded by contemporaries for his perfection of the mechanical theory of muscular contraction in his Elementorum myologiae specimen (1667) and for his defense of the Cartesian physiological methodology in his anatomically sound Discours sur l'anatomie du cerveau (1669).

Many other prominent seventeenth-century physiological writers were influenced by the Cartesian program, either directly by reading Descartes's writings or indirectly through such followers as Steno. Among those deeply influenced by Cartesian physiology were Robert Hooke, Thomas Willis, Jan Swammerdam, and Giovanni Alfonso Borelli. These men saw in Cartesian physiology exactly what Descartes had intended it to be: a method of mechanistic formulation by which traditional categories of physiological explanation could be circumvented. Without Descartes, the seventeenth-century mechanization of physiological conceptions would have been inconceivable.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The main primary sources—letters, MSS, and published works—are all handsomely printed in the Adam-Tannery Oeuvres de Descartes; vol. XI contains the largest sample of relevant works.

Useful secondary studies of Descartes's philosophy which seriously consider his physiological writings range from Étienne Gilson's Études sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du système Cartésien (Paris, 1930) to Norman Kemp Smith's New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes (New York, 1966). Two older monographic studies are also useful: Bertrand de Saint-Germain's Descartes considéré comme physiologiste (Paris, 1869) and Auguste-Georges Berthier's “Le mécanisme Cartésien et la physiologie au XVIIe siècle,” in Isis, 2 (1914), 37-89, and 3 (1920), 21-58. Some of the background to Descartes's treatment of vision is made clear in A. C. Crombie, “The Mechanistic Hypothesis and the Scientific Study of Vision,” in Proceedings of the Royal Microscopical Society, 2 (1907), 3-112; fundamental aspects of his mechanistic philosophy are discussed in Georges Canguilhem, La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1955); while the seventeenth-century impact of Cartesian ideas is studied by Berthier (op. cit.) and in two helpful general works, Paul Mouy, Le développement de la physique Cartésienne (Paris, 1934) and vol. I of Thomas S. Hall, Ideas of Life and Matter (Chicago, 1969).

A sense of the influence of Cartesian ideas and methods can also be gleaned from Michael Foster, Lectures on the History of Physiology (Cambridge, 1901); and Gustav Scherz's various studies of Nicholas Steno. Finally, see Aram Vartanian, Diderot and Descartes (Princeton, 1953) and La Mettrie's “L'homme machine” (Princeton, 1960).

THEODORE M. BROWN