[242] Que dirons nous maintenant si peut-être le raisonnement n’est rien autre chose qu’un assemblage et un enchaînement de noms par ce mot est? D’ou il s’ensuivroit que par la raison nous ne concluons rien de tout touchant la nature des choses, mais seulement touchant leurs appellations, c’est à dire que par elle nous voyons simplement si nous assemblons bien ou mal les noms des choses, selon les conventions que nous avons faites à notre fantaisie touchant leurs significations, p. 476. Descartes merely answered:--L’assemblage qui se fait dans le raisonnement n’est pas celui des noms, mais bien celui des choses signifiées par les noms; et je m’étonne que le contraire puisse venir en l’esprit de personne. Descartes treated Hobbes, whom he did not esteem, with less attention than his other correspondents. Hobbes could not understand what have been called ideas of reflection, such as fear, and thought it was nothing more than the idea of the object feared. “For what else is the fear of a lion,” he says, “than the idea of this lion, and the effect which it produces in the heart, which leads us to run away? But this running is not a thought; so that nothing of thought exists in fear but the idea of the object.” Descartes only replied, “it is self-evident that it is not the same thing to see a lion and fear him, that it is to see him only,” p. 483. [243] I suspect, from what I have since read, that Hobbes had a different, and what seems to me a very erroneous view of infinite, or infinitesimal quantities in geometry. For he answers the old sophism of Zeno, Quicquid dividi potest in partes infinitas est infinitum, in a manner which does not meet the real truth of the case: Dividi posse in partes infinitas nihil aliud est quam dividi posse in partes _quotcunque quis velit_. Logica sive Computatio, c. 5., p. 38 (edit. 1667). |Stewart’s remarks on Descartes.|