Descartes’s Ontology
The Meditations may have moved epistemology to the
center of modern philosophy, but Descartes himself
conceived it as a work of metaphysics: “Meditations
on First Philosophy” was his title for it. Still, the meta-
physics in the Meditations is mostly of the special
variety: natural theology, cosmology, and rational psy-
chology. There is not much general metaphysics or
ontology in it. Descartes does sometimes make onto-
logical remarks, as when he says in Meditation Three
that ‘the mode of being by which a thing exists objec-
tively in the intellect by way of an idea, imperfect
though it may be, is certainly not nothing’ (VII. 41).
And he appeals to various ontological principles in
arguing for the existence of God: for example, that
‘there must be as much “reality” in the . . . cause as in
the effect of that cause’ (VII. 40) and that ‘existence is
a perfection’ (VII. 67). But he undertakes no purposeful
investigation of being qua being, no systematic survey
of the modes and categories of being.
This neglect of ontology is remedied somewhat in the
Principles. Here, in the articles comprising the final
third of Part I, Descartes does list and distinguish the
basic kinds of things he supposes there to be. He also
articulates a number of ontological doctrines which are
at best only implicit in the Meditations. I say ‘at best’
because it may be questioned whether Descartes actually
held certain of these doctrines at the time he wrote the
Meditations. In any case, some portions of the ontology
presented in the Principles cover topics that receive no
mention in the Meditations: the status of eternal truths,
for one. And in at least one instance Descartes takes a
position in the later work that seems directly to conflict
with a doctrine stated in the earlier one. I refer to his
account of universals in the Principles, within which
category he includes the numbers and figures which are
the objects of mathematical inquiry. By this account,
these entities are merely ideas in the mind, mere ‘modes
Topoi 16: 111–127, 1997.
 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Vere Chappell
of thinking’ which have no actual existence. But in the
Fifth Meditation, mathematical objects are held to be
things ‘that have their own true and immutable natures
[which are] not invented by [any human being] or
dependent on [his] mind’ (VII. 64).
Questions about the relation between the ontology
laid out in the Principles and that, implicit if not
expressly stated, of the Meditations, provide one reason
for examining the text of the relevant Principles passage
quite carefully. Another reason is that this text by itself
is problematic. Descartes’s presentation in Articles 48
and following is rather sketchy and disorganized, and
his meaning is often unclear and indistinct. It is sur-
prising that scholars have paid so little attention to this
passage, and that some have read it so superficially.
There has, it is true, been some discussion of the
apparent conflict between the Principles account of
mathematical objects and that of the Meditations; but
the parties thereto have reached no consensus.
This paper has two parts. In the first I spell out and
elucidate the ontology expressed in Principles I.48–70,
explicating the text of this passage and resolving the
interpretive problems it presents as they arise. In the
second I consider the relation between the Fifth
Meditation account of mathematical objects and that of
the Principles. I shall argue that there is really no
conflict between these two accounts since the former
can be assimilated to the latter. A question I am not
going to deal with in this paper is that of the extent to
which the ontology of the Principles is implicit in the
Meditations, as opposed to being a later construction.
And of course a full treatment of Descartes’s ontology
would have to consider ontological doctrines expressed
or presupposed in works other than the Meditations and
the Principles. But that is a task for another paper.
Before beginning my examination of Principles
I.48–70, I need to settle some terminological matters.
112 VERE CHAPPELL
First, ontologists require some way of referring, pre-
or extra-theoretically as it were, to all or any of the
things that in some sense or other have being, to the
items that are originally there to be divided up into onto-
logical categories. In English the word ‘thing’ can be
used for this purpose; so can the common nouns ‘being’,
‘entity’, and ‘item’. But ‘thing’ is not a good word to
use in discussing Descartes’s ontology. The reason is
that he tends to take its Latin equivalent, res, to mean
substantia, and hence to restrict it to the members of
one ontological category. Nor is there any noun other
than ‘thing’ that Descartes regularly uses as an extra-
categorical general term. His standard way of making
these pre-theoretical references is via pronouns and
pronominal phrases – omnia, alia, ea quae . . . , quae-
cunque . . . , etc. – a usage that is natural and
perspicuous in Latin but awkward and often ambiguous
in English. In this paper I follow the English custom of
using common nouns in this connection, ‘being’,
‘entity’, and ‘item’, but not ‘thing’. ‘Thing’ I reserve,
as Descartes largely does, for substances.
Second, Descartes sometimes uses the terms
‘attribute’, ‘affection’, ‘mode’, ‘quality’, and ‘property’
interchangeably, as if they all stood indifferently for
entities of one general category. But sometimes he
distinguishes these terms by restricting some of them
to certain subdivisions of this general class. In what
follows I have opted for the latter practice. Thus I use
‘attribute’ and ‘affection’ as more general terms
covering the whole class of entities in question, and
restrict ‘mode’, ‘quality’, and ‘property’ to the specific
subclasses to which Descartes sometimes – but only
sometimes – applies them.
Finally, the word ‘mode’ is particularly protean in
Cartesian texts. Apart from the two uses just noted, (1)
as a synonym for ‘attribute’ and (2) for marking the
members of a subclass of attributes, two others are
commonly found. In one of these, (3) a mode is a
specific variety or form, a species, of something more
general; in the other, (4) it has the ordinary non-philo-
sophical meaning of ‘manner’ or ‘way’. In all of these
senses the word ‘mode’ often is followed by an ‘of ’-
clause, but the prepositional object is different in dif-
ferent cases. When the mode mentioned is either an
attribute in general or a special sort of attribute (as in
the first and second of the senses just listed), the object
to which it is attributed via ‘of ’ is a substance; thus
‘mode of my mind’ and ‘mode of an extended sub-
stance’. By contrast, when it is a species or form of
something more general (third sense), the object is
an attribute; thus ‘mode of extension’ and ‘mode of
thinking’ (or ‘thought’). (There appear to be no restric-
tions as to what modes in the fourth sense may be modes
of.) The situation is complicated by the fact that
Descartes uses the phrase ‘mode of thinking’ itself in
two different ways. In one the word ‘mode’ occurs with
the third sense and the ‘thinking’ refers to an attribute,
so that the whole phrase stands for a species of thinking:
perceiving or willing, or doubting, imagining, judging,
etc. In the other, the ‘mode’ has the fourth meaning, and
the phrase is equivalent to ‘way of regarding’, ‘manner
of conceiving’, or some such. In my discussion I shall
have occasion to use the word ‘mode’ in all but the first
of its four senses, and the phrase ‘mode of thinking’ in
both of its two. I will do my best to make clear on each
such occasion which sense is being employed.
I. Exposition of Principles I.48–70
My exposition is keyed to the accompanying charts. I
distinguish three sections within this passage, com-
prising Articles 48, 51–56, and 57–59, respectively. The
remaining Articles, from 60 to 70, refine and illustrate
but do not really extend the basic scheme that Descartes
presents in 48–59. In addition, there is a portion of
Descartes’s ontology which, though not explicitly stated
in the passage, can easily and naturally be extrapolated
from it: this too is represented on my charts. The levels
I refer to in my exposition correspond to the lines of
text on each chart, counting from the top.
 DESCARTES’S ONTOLOGY
A. Section One: Article 48
Objects of Perception
Eternal Things-and-
Truths Affections-of-Things
omni-generic
intellectual
Substances Attributes
= Minds
ref to
Minds
Appetities
1. Level one: ‘whatever falls under our perception’
Descartes identifies his initial subject matter as
‘whatever falls under our perception’. By doing so he
is not of course restricting it to the objects of sense per-
ception. He gives the term ‘perception’ its maximum
scope, using it to cover every way in which a human
knower may apprehend or be aware of something.
We still might wonder whether the field of the
perceivable, even in this extended sense, exhausts the
whole field of being for Descartes. Does he hold that
the subject matter of ontology extends beyond what can
be humanly perceived, that there are entities apart from
those that we can think or be aware of ? There is cer-
tainly no indication in our passage that he does, and I
know of no text in any other work that points to this
position either.
2. Level two: ‘things or affections of things’ vs.
‘eternal truths’
This is Descartes’s first division within the field of the
perceivable, and here again the question arises: does this
division exhaust the field? That is, does it exhaust even
this field, never mind the (perhaps more extensive) field
of being? Again, there is nothing in the Principles
passage to suggest that it does not.
Turning to the terms of the division, let us first
consider eternal truths. Descartes says that these ‘have
no existence outside our thought’, implying that they do
exist within our thought. He must regard them, there-
fore, as mere ‘objects of thought’, entia rationis, to use
the Scholastic term, or ‘objective beings’, to use his
113
uni-generic
material
Substances Attributes
= Bodies
ref to ref to
M-B Unions Bodies
Emotions Sensations
own term from the Meditations. Note further that they
have no existence outside our, that is, human thought.
Descartes does not say that we human beings create
these truths: they need not be the products of our
minds. But it is in our minds and only there that they
‘reside’.
One might well wonder how any mere object of
human thought, any entity existing in and only in a
human mind, could also be eternal. To be eternal is to
be outside time, but human minds exist within time.
Descartes sometimes used the word ‘eternal’ to mean
not ‘timeless’ but ‘everlasting’; but even if what he
means here is ‘everlasting’, it is hard to square a truth’s
having that attribute with its having existence solely in
human thought. Descartes held that all human souls,
once created, never thenceforth cease to exist; but he
did not hold that any human soul began to exist at the
beginning of time. This is a problem I shall address in
Part II of this paper.
The other category that Descartes introduces at this
second level is ‘things or affections of things’. This is
not one single category but a compound of two, things
on the one hand, affections of things on the other.
Descartes eventually distinguishes these two, but not
until he reaches level five of his initial classificatory
scheme (in Section One), and then only implicitly; and
it is not until Section Two of the passage that he gives
them their proper names, ‘substances’ and ‘attributes’
respectively. In the meantime he treats them as one
(and I shall henceforth refer to this compound via
the hyphenated title ‘things-and-affections-of-things’),
114 VERE CHAPPELL
though some statements he makes at levels three and
four apply to one of the two categories and not to the
other.
Descartes takes eternal truths to be objects of
thought, that is, objective beings, in our passage. It
might be supposed that he regards things-and-affections-
of-things as entities existing outside human thought, that
is, as actual beings (to use a Cartesian term found in the
Meditations). The fact is that he does consider many
things (i.e. substances) and many affections of things
(i.e. attributes) to be actual beings, but not all of them.
In Section Three (Article 57) of the passage, he intro-
duces a distinction between attributes which are ‘in
the very things of which they are said to be attributes’
and those which are ‘only in our thought’. The same
distinction may be made, I believe, among substances,
though Descartes takes no notice of it here (this is the
main point of the extrapolation I referred to earlier). But
this is just the distinction between actual beings and
objective beings, between those that exist outside and
those that exist within our thought. I shall have more
to say about this distinction later on.
3. Level three: ‘the most general things’ vs. those
confined to one genus
Descartes does not say much about these ‘most general
things’, in Article 48 or elsewhere in our passage,
although he invokes examples of them on several occa-
sions. The examples he gives here are ‘substance’,
‘duration’, ‘order’, and ‘number’; later he appears to
add ‘existence’ (Article 56) and perhaps ‘time’ (Article
57) to the list. We see at once that none of these, save
substance itself, is properly a thing; they are rather
attributes, that is, affections of things. But there is no
mislabeling here. The field that Descartes is dividing
at this level is still the compound ‘things-and-affections-
of-things’.
Duration, number, order, existence – we have no
trouble conceiving these as attributes, and Descartes
clearly does so conceive them. But we do encounter dif-
ficulty in trying to think of substance as a thing, that
is, as a substance. This difficulty can be resolved, as we
shall see in due course. In the meantime I shall merely
assume that Descartes’s category of ‘most general
things’ includes both substances and attributes.
Descartes says that these most general entities
‘extend to all genera of things’; I call them, therefore,
‘omni-generic’ entities. He then immediately informs us
that there are only two ‘genera of things’ (or at least
two summa such genera); and he identifies them as the
genus of ‘intellectual things’ and that of ‘material
things’. One question that arises here is whether
Descartes is claiming that every being in both of these
genera has – or is – each of these most general entities,
that is, has existence, number, and duration and is a sub-
stance. Or is his claim merely that at least one being in
each genus has or is each of these general entities? The
answer is obviously the latter. It may be that every being
has existence (actual or objective) and number (at least
the number one) for Descartes. But not every intellec-
tual or material being is a substance, since some are
attributes. And God, who Descartes later says is a
thinking substance (Article 54), cannot have either
duration (since He is eternal) or order (since He is
simple). But then it follows that these most general
entities cannot be identified with the transcendentals of
Scholastic philosophy, as at least one recent commen-
tator has suggested.1 For the transcendentals are all
supposed to be ‘convertible with being’.
From what are Descartes’s omni-generic entities dis-
tinguished? Since there are only two genera of things,
the only alternatives (for a thing or an affection thereof )
to being found in all genera are (1) being found in
exactly one of these two, and (2) being found in neither
of them. But the latter is evidently not an option for
Descartes. On the one hand, there is not only no genus
of beings as such, but no genus of things-and-affections-
of-things, or of substances, or of numbered or enduring
things, given that the genera of intellectual and material
entities are the highest genera there are; and on this
point Descartes is in accord with Scholastic doctrine.
On the other hand, there are no things or affections
of things existing outside genera, no extra-generic
such entities. The things-and-affections-of-things other
than those that are omni-generic, therefore, must be
‘uni-generic’.
4. Level four: intellectual vs. materials things
Descartes distinguishes his two ‘summa genera of
things’ at the same time that he says that there are two
of them. He does not at this point cite any basis or prin-
ciple for drawing the distinction: he merely names the
two genera and gives examples of items included in
each of them. It needs to be noted again that though he
calls what he is distinguishing ‘things’, he means
‘things-and affections of things’; and in fact the items
he cites as examples of ‘intellectual things’ and
‘material things’ are all of them attributes. For he
 DESCARTES’S ONTOLOGY
describes them as ‘things . . . pertaining to’ substances,
to ‘mind or to thinking substance’ in the one case, and
to ‘extended substance [or] to body’ in the other. This
is one of his standard ways (and one of the Scholastics’
ways too) of specifying attributes.
5. Level five: substances vs. attributes
Although Descartes mentions substances in describing
the items, that is, the attributes, that belong to the genera
of intellectual and material things, he does not explic-
itly say that these substances also belong to these
genera. But there is no doubt that he holds that they
do. Furthermore, although the distinction between sub-
stance and attribute that I represent him as introducing
at level five of my exposition is not in fact explicitly
made by him, at that point or anywhere in Article 48,
it surely is fair to claim that the distinction is implicit
there.
6. Level six: certain other [things] that we
experience in ourselves
Having distinguished intellectual from material things,
Descartes cites ‘certain others [that] we experience in
ourselves’. But his text at this point is obscure, and
commentators have had different opinions as to its
import. The main point at issue is the status of these
‘others’, which, Descartes tells us, include appetites,
emotions, and sensations. These, he says, ‘are not
to be referred either solely to the mind or solely to
the body, but arise from the close and intimate union
of our mind with the body’. This could mean that
B. Section Two: Articles 51–56
Things-and-Affections-of-Things
Substances
constant
principal non-principal
uncreated created uncreated created
uni-gen omni-gen uni-gen uni-gen uni-gen omni-gen
G S M B d i m nn
115
these entities, which are in fact attributes, constitute
a separate ontological category, a distinct kind of
attribute, apart from and on a par with the intel-
lectual and material attributes which are to be
referred solely to the mind and solely to the body,
respectively. On this reading, Descartes would not
be a dualist but a ‘trialist’, as John Cottingham has
put it, at least regarding attributes.2 Alternatively, it
could be Descartes’s view that these entities belong
to one or the other of the two categories, and differ
from its other members only at some sub-categorical
level.
My own position is that Descartes holds the latter of
these two alternatives, as is shown on my chart. I take
the ‘others’ in question to belong ontologically to the
category of intellectual attributes, and not to constitute
a distinctive third kind of attribute. They differ from the
other members of this category in that they require
causes of both the mental and the material kinds in order
to exist, whereas the other intellectual modes require
none but mental causes. (Correspondingly, attributes in
the material category require none but material causes.)
But it is not the kind of cause an entity has that deter-
mines the ontological category it belongs to, at least at
the level of the categories of intellectual and material
beings. For causes according to Descartes operate across
these categorical boundaries.
I know that this position needs defending, but I shan’t
defend it here, since to do so would divert me from the
task of surveying Descartes’s whole ontology.3
Attributes
variable
Qualities Modes
created created created
?
uni-gen omni-gen uni-gen omni-gen uni-gen
? ?
i m nn i m nn i m
116 VERE CHAPPELL
1. Level one: things-and-affections-of-things
In Article 51, Descartes returns to the ground he has
covered in Article 48 and begins tracing a different
path through it. The new scheme he produces is not in
conflict with the earlier one; rather, it interpolates new
divisions within it and adds detail under existing divi-
sions. The resulting structure can be mapped on to that
Section One in different ways; the way I have chosen
is shown by my charts.
2. Level two: substances vs. attributes
This time through, Descartes draws the distinction
between substance and attribute explicitly, and indicates
the basis on which he does so. By a substance, he
says, we understand ‘a thing which so exists that it
requires no other thing for its existence’. Implicit in
this formula is a definition of an attribute as a thing
which does require another thing for its existence,
and this is spelled out in a clause added to the
French translation of the Principles (at Article 51):
‘things [that] are of such a nature that they cannot
exist without other things, we . . . call . . . attributes’
(IXB.47).
There are well-known problems with these defini-
tions. At the least it seems that, in order to understand
them, we must already have some understanding of the
terms being defined. We need to know what a substance
and what an attribute is, and to grasp the specific (non-
causal) kind of dependence the one has upon the other.
As Descartes might have put it, we need to understand
that special way of depending in which attributes are
wont to depend on substances.
3. Level five: uncreated vs. created substances and
attributes
Immediately upon defining substance, Descartes pro-
ceeds to distinguish one particular substance, God, from
‘all other substances’. The latter, he says, are the ‘crea-
tures’ of God, whereas God himself is uncreated. His
point is that God is the only being that strictly satisfies
his definition of substance. Instead of concluding,
however, that it is false or inaccurate to call creatures
substances, Descartes announces ‘that the term “sub-
stance” does not apply univocally’ to them and to God,
meaning that God and created things are substances in
different senses of the word.
We should note that not only is God an uncreated
for Descartes, but that His attributes must be uncreated
too. And so are the attributes of created substances the
creatures of God.
4. Level three: constant vs. variable attributes
Descartes next moves to consider attributes, making a
number of divisions among them and adding, along the
way, details to his account of substances. From now on,
however, my discussion will proceed in a somewhat dif-
ferent order from that of his presentation.
The division between (what I call) constant and
variable attributes is merely implicit in Descartes’s text,
but it is presupposed by two divisions that he does make
explicitly.
An attribute is constant iff it is never absent from
the substance that possesses it, that is, in the case of an
enduring substance, iff it inheres in or is exemplified by
that substance at every moment of its existence. It is
important to notice that this definition is satisfied by
two different kinds of attribute for Descartes, those he
calls principal attributes and those I am calling omni-
generic ones. Thus not only extension in a corporeal
substance and thinking in a mind, but ‘existence and
duration in an existing and enduring thing’ are constant
attributes.
A variable attribute, by contrast, is either one that
an enduring substance has at certain times and lacks at
others, an attribute that is gained or lost; or else it is one
that, though never lost, undergoes change in the course
of its existence. Thus if an apple turns from green to
red, its greenness is a variable attribute according to the
first clause of the formula just stated; its color is one
according to the second.
5. Level four: principal vs. non-principal attributes
In Article 53, Descartes lays down a fundamental prin-
ciple of his ontology. A substance, he declares, has
many attributes, ‘but for each substance there is one
principal property, which constitutes its nature and
essence, and to which all the others are referred’. By
‘one’ principal property here Descartes means ‘one
exactly’, not ‘one at least’; and for a property to ‘be
referred to’ another, he tells us two sentences later, is
for it to ‘presuppose’ it (Latin praesupponere). But
when he says that ‘all’ the other properties of a sub-
stance are referred to its principal one, he does not mean
‘all’ without qualification. He means all of its uni-
generic properties, for the point does not hold, for
example, for existence or duration. From the fact that
 DESCARTES’S ONTOLOGY
something exists, nothing whatsoever follows as to what
its principal property is.
The principal property of minds, of course, is
thought; of bodies it is extension; and Descartes fre-
quently, throughout his writings, identifies thought and
extension as the essences of these substances, respec-
tively. He has some trouble defining the term ‘essence’,
however. One problem is to distinguish essences from
omni-generic attributes, since these too are always
present: a substance (that once has them) never lacks
them. And not only does it never lack them in fact but
it could not lack them and still exist. Indeed, Descartes
goes so far as to say (in Article 62) that a substance
and its duration are distinguished merely ratione, which
means that the substance ‘cannot be understood without’
that attribute. This is exactly what he holds about the
distinction between a substance and its essence: a body
or a mind cannot be understood as lacking extension or
thought, respectively.
So then what is the difference between an essence
or nature and an omni-generic attribute for Descartes?
For one thing, an essence or principal attribute deter-
mines a genus of things, indeed a highest genus (there
being only two such attributes), in the sense that the
class containing all and only the substances that
have it constitutes a genus, whereas an omni-generic
attribute does not. Again, the essence of a substance is
entailed by each of its uni-generic attributes – or, to
put it in a more Cartesian way, the concept of the one
is contained in that of the other – whereas its omni-
generic attributes are not so entailed. These are not of
course surprising points, since they are built into
Descartes’s definitions of these terms ‘genus’ and ‘uni-
generic’.
Distinguishing essences from omni-generic attributes
is one problem we encounter in trying to define
‘essence’ in the Cartesian sense. But it is not the only
such problem. For omni-generic attributes are not the
only non-principal constant attributes that Descartes
recognizes. There are also those that fall under the tra-
ditional Aristotelian heading of ‘properties’. Descartes
does not mention these properties until he comes to
discuss universals, in Article 59: they constitute one of
the five types of universal that he says are ‘commonly
listed’. Nor does he provide any characterization of
them even then. But it is clear from the example he
gives, viz. ‘that the square on [the] hypotenuse [of a
right-angled triangle] is equal to [the sum of ] the
117
squares on its sides’, and from what he says about it,
viz. that it belongs to ‘all and only’ right-angled trian-
gles’, that properties meet the same condition that
essences do: they are attributes without which the sub-
stances possessing them cannot exist. The Aristotelians
of course have a similar problem of distinguishing
essences from properties. But they also have more
resources for dealing with this problem than Descartes
has at his disposal: a richer conception of essence
grounded in a theory of scientific explanation. Note that
I say: resources for dealing with the problem, not for
successfully solving it.
6. Level four: qualities vs. modes
In Article 56 Descartes notes that he has been using the
terms ‘quality’ and ‘mode’ as synonyms for ‘attribute’.
But these terms, he announces, also have a narrower
use, in which they apply only to a restricted subclass
of attributes – those I call variable attributes. Descartes
then undertakes to distinguish modes and qualities from
one another. Unfortunately, his attempt to explain the
narrower use of these terms is unilluminating. When,
he says, ‘we consider a substance to be affected or
modified [variari] by [its attributes], we call [these
attributes] modes; when it can be designated as such and
such [talem] by this modification we call them quali-
ties’. Cottingham in his translation puts an Aristotelian
spin on the last part of this statement by rendering talem
‘a substance of such and such a kind’, and if Descartes
were invoking an Aristotelian theory of species and
genera here, it would be appropriate to interpret his
words in this way. But I see no justification for
Cottingham’s reading in the text itself, and no other
reason to think that Descartes is alluding to Aristotle
here.
Descartes gives no example of qualities in the
narrower sense and (I believe) never uses the term
‘quality’ again in this sense, in the Principles or else-
where. Hence I shall having nothing specific to say
about these qualities. The situation is different, however,
with respect to modes. Not only does Descartes often
use the word ‘mode’, in the narrow way; he also gives
several examples of modes in this sense; so we are able
to get quite a firm grip on his conception of them. Thus
in Article 61 he cites as examples of modes proprie
dicta the square shape and the motion of a square
moving stone. In Article 64 he says that thought and
extension, which have been identified as the principal
118 VERE CHAPPELL
attributes of minds and bodies respectively, ‘can also be
taken as modes of substances, in that one and the same
mind can have many different thoughts, and one and the
same body’ can have, at different times, many different
sizes and shapes. He then makes it clear that it is the
different thoughts and the different sizes and shapes
themselves that are the modes of the substances ‘in
which they inhere’.
Finally, in Article 65, he lists ‘intellection, imagina-
tion, recollection, volition, etc.’ on the one hand, and
‘all shapes, the positions of parts, and the motions of
parts’ on the other, as ‘modes of the things in which
they inhere’ – that is, of thinking and extended sub-
stances respectively. The text here is a little confusing,
in that Descartes first describes the items on the first list
as ‘modes of thought’ and those on the second as
‘modes of extension’. This is a case in which he is using
the word ‘mode’ in two different senses, without any
indication that he is doing so. The point he wants to
make in the Article is that intellection and the other
items he lists are modes in the sense of attributes (i.e.
in the second of the four senses I distinguished earlier).
But he identifies the items in question by referring them
to the more general principal attributes of which they
are species, calling them modes of the latter (in the third
sense of ‘mode’).
One further point about modes and qualities. In God
there are attributes, Descartes observes, but no modes
or qualities, because in God there is no variation. Hence,
as is shown on my chart, the only modes and qualities
there are, are created ones, that is, ones belonging to
created substances.
7. Level six: omni-generic vs. uni-generic attributes
and substances
Descartes’s distinction between omni- and uni-generic
attributes, first introduced in Section One of our
passage, is invoked on several occasions in Section
Two. We encounter problems, however, when we try to
fit this distinction into the more elaborate system of dis-
tinctions that Descartes constructs in Section Two.
Some points are clear enough, but others are not. (a)
It is clear that no principal attribute is omni-generic,
since it is principal attributes that determine the genera
there are. (b) It also is clear that an uncreated attribute
must be uni-generic, since it is a principal attribute. But
to what genus does it belong? One possibility is, to the
genus of intellectual entities, since God is a thinking
substance. On the other hand, the term ‘thinking’, pre-
sumably, is not applied univocally to God and his crea-
tures; and this could mean that God and they can’t
belong to the same genus after all. (c) It is clear that
Descartes’s main examples of omni-generic entities,
duration, number, order, and existence, fall into the
category of constant non-principal attributes, although
he has no common name for them (which is why I
label them ‘nn’ on my chart). But what are the uni-
generic members of this category? One answer is, the
Aristotelian ‘properties’ that he includes among the
‘five common universals’ in Article 59. This is plau-
sible, given his example there, and on the assumption
that such properties are to be found not only in geo-
metrical entities but also in bodies and minds. (d) In the
case of qualities, nothing is clear: whether they are all
omni-generic, all uni-generic, or come in both varieties.
(e) And it is clear, finally, that all of Descartes’s
examples of modes, which we surveyed a moment ago,
are uni-generic. But are there any other modes that are
omni-generic, and if so, what are they? Here again is
one possible answer: there are such modes, and they are
modes of number or order in the way that a particular
thought and a particular shape are modes of thinking
and extension. (Note the shift in sense between the first
‘modes’ and the other two in the foregoing sentence.)
The latter, Descartes says, are modes of the substances
to which they belong; and so, we might say, are the
former. But what would such a mode of number or of
order be? How about a particular number or order, for
example, the number two and the order in a straight
line? (I am not sure that this move would work for
duration, much less for existence.)
The most vexing question that arises at this level,
however, concerns substances rather than attributes.
There is no doubt that all the substances Descartes iden-
tifies as such, created and uncreated, are uni-generic,
though we have not yet determined which genus it is
that the uncreated substance, along with its attributes,
belongs to. What is uncertain is whether there are
any substances that Descartes would recognize as omni-
generic. In favor of an affirmative answer is the fact that
Descartes includes ‘substance’, along with ‘duration’
and ‘number’, on his list of ‘most general things’ when
he first introduces this category. Furthermore, it is
obvious that the term ‘substance’ applies to both minds
and bodies (and that it does so univocally). On the other
side, although duration and number are attributes, it
 DESCARTES’S ONTOLOGY
sounds gibberish to say that substance is a substance.
Second, even if we can allow this substance to be a sub-
stance, we are hard put to say which substance it is. It
cannot be God, or any body or mind, since these are
all uni-generic. And what other substances are there for
Descartes? Finally, it appears that an omni-generic sub-
stance would have no principal attribute. But this
violates Descartes’s fundamental requirement that every
substance have exactly one principal property.
I think I know how to answer this question, but I need
to lay out Descartes’s theory of universals before doing
so.
8. Level seven: God, minds, and bodies and the
attributes thereof
We come now to the level at which individual sub-
stances and fully specified attributes appear. Let us run
through their various categories in the order in which
they are represented, left to right, on my chart, begin-
ning with God.
God is of course the uncreated substance, the one and
only such substance there is, and all the divine attrib-
utes are uncreated too. Every divine attribute, moreover,
is a principal attribute. This might seem surprising, for
isn’t existence a divine attribute, and yet doesn’t it
‘extend to all genera of things’? The answer is, Yes and
No. God’s existence is one of his attributes, but his exis-
tence is special, as is his thinking and the substance he
is: the term ‘existence’ is not said univocally of God
and of the created beings existing in genera. Descartes
states explicitly of God’s existence (in the Fifth
Meditation) that it ‘pertains to [His] essence’ (VII.68),
and the same is true of every one of his attributes. That
is why every divine attribute is a principal attribute.
We might even conclude, in view of Descartes’s insis-
tence in the Third Meditation on the ‘unity’ and ‘sim-
plicity’ of the divine attributes, that these all reduce
somehow to one single attribute. In any case, it is clear
that the divine attributes are not only uni-generic, as we
have already noted they are, but unique to the single
individual substance who is God. This suggests an
answer to the question raised earlier, concerning the
genus to which God belongs. It is that his genus too is
unique to God, that he is its only member. If so, we
cannot place God in the genus of thinking beings,
119
despite Descartes’s characterization of him as a thinking
substance.
I come now to the created substances, first the
mysterious, omni-generic ‘substance’, then individual
minds and bodies, and finally the different varieties of
created attributes. The first I pass over, pending my dis-
cussion of universals. About minds and bodies I have
only one point to add to what I have already said about
them, viz. that each individual mind is, as Descartes
affirms in Article 60, ‘really distinct [both] from every
other thinking substance and from every corporeal sub-
stance’. This last point is one that Descartes explicitly
argues for in the Sixth Meditation. Here he seems to
regard it as a straightforward consequence of the onto-
logical doctrines he has been presenting.
As for the created attributes, about them I have
nothing to add to my earlier accounts of them. But there
is a further point about the whole scheme I have been
presenting. It is that this scheme could be continued;
that is, the categories of substances and attributes at
which we have arrived could be further subdivided. Or
at least some of them could. We could introduce sub-
genera of bodies and of modes, certainly, though the
other cases aren’t so clear. But there is this interesting
difference, from the Cartesian perspective, between the
two tasks of subdividing bodies and subdividing modes.
The former Descartes would likely assign to the natural
scientists, physicists and biologists as we should now
call them; whereas the latter he might still regard as a
proper pursuit for ontologists. There is certainly a basis
in his works for distinguishing, within the category of
modes, subcategories of ‘standing’ as opposed to
‘occurring’ properties, ‘dispositions’ vs. ‘states’, ‘activ-
ities’ vs. ‘events’ (my terminology, not Descartes’s),
among others. And these are, I believe he would grant,
ontological distinctions.
C. Section Three: Articles 57–59
The chart representing this third Section continues that
of Section Two; its first six levels coincide with levels
two through seven on the attribute side of the Section
Two chart.
120 VERE CHAPPELL

Attributes

constant variable

principal non-principal Qualities Modes

uncreated created created created created

?
uni-gen uni-gen omni-gen uni-gen omni-gen uni-gen omni-gen uni-gen
? ?
d i m nn i m nn i m nn i m
? ? ?
a o a o a o a o a o a o a o a o a o a o a o a o
? ? ? ? ? ?
p p u p p u p p u p p u p p u p p u p p u p p u p p u p p u p p u p p u

1. Level seven: actual vs. objective attributes ‘objective’ sense. In this sense an idea is, as he puts it
In Article 57 Descartes distinguishes those attributes in the Preface to the Meditations, ‘the thing that is
which ‘are in the very things of which they are the represented by’ an idea in the first sense, insofar as this
attributes’ from those which are ‘only in our thought’. ‘is not supposed to exist outside the intellect’ (VII.8).
This is the distinction between what I call actual and We might also say that an objective being is the
objective attributes, and as my chart shows it cuts across object of an idea (in the first sense) or what the idea is
all the other distinctions among attributes. Thus, for an idea of, except that these expressions also are
each individual attribute that exists actually, there is – ambiguous, as is ‘object of thought’. For we can and
or rather could be – an objective attribute that matches often do think or have an idea of something that exists
or mirrors it; and for each attribute that exists objec- outside our thought, for example, the actual sun. In that
tively, there is or could be an actual attribute that case it is entirely proper to describe the actual sun as
matches or mirrors it. The qualification ‘could be’ is the object of our thought, or as that which our idea is
necessary because the attributes that happen to exist in an idea of. Thus when we describe an objective being,
the world do not correspond one to one with those that for example, the objective sun, as the object of an idea,
human beings happen to think of. On each side there are we have to mean something different. Descartes appeals
some that have no counterparts on the other: attributes to this distinction in the First Reply to explain the
that people think of but are non-existent in actuality, and meaning of ‘idea’ in the second sense just noted, that
actually existing attributes that no one ever thinks of. in which an objective being is an idea. An idea of the
But there is no attribute found in either the objective sun, he says, ‘is the sun itself existing in the intellect,
or the actual realm which could not have a counterpart not of course existing formally, as it does in the sky, but
in the other. existing objectively, that is in the way in which objects
I use the term ‘objective being’ to stand for an entity are wont to be in the intellect’ (VII.102–103). (Note that
that exists in someone’s mind when he or she thinks of Descartes uses this term ‘formally’ as a synonym for
something. Of course a thought is such an entity, but ‘actually’ in the Third Meditation, e.g., at VII.41.)
that is not what I mean. Another such entity is a Perhaps it would be more illuminating to describe an
Cartesian idea, but this term ‘idea’ is ambiguous as objective being as the internal object of an idea or
Descartes uses it. In one sense he gives the word, an thought, or as its content, as philosophers nowadays
idea is an occurrence in a mind, a mental event or ‘oper- sometimes do. Descartes does not use these expressions,
ation of the intellect’. This he calls the ‘material’ sense but he does speak of ideas, in the sense of mental occur-
of the word, and in this sense ideas are not objective rences, as ‘containing’ entities which turn out to be
beings either, though they are thoughts. But objective objective beings.
beings can be identified with ideas in the other sense Internal objects of thought, contents of ideas, ideas
in which Descartes uses the word, which he calls the themselves as objects existing in our minds – these of
 DESCARTES’S ONTOLOGY
course have been the subject of philosophical contention
for many centuries. Some philosophers have argued that
there simply are no such entities; some commentators
have claimed that Descartes did not believe in them. For
my part, I believe that Descartes did believe in them,
and further that it is no philosophical sin to do so. I also
believe – and here am acting on the belief – that
Descartes’s theory of objective being can be used to illu-
minate his doctrine of universals.
Before proceeding to that, I need to note that
although Descartes introduces the distinction between
actual and objective beings in his discussion of attrib-
utes, it is clear that the same distinction can be extended
to substances. I shall provide details of this extrapola-
tion, as I call it, just below.
2. Level eight: particular vs. universal attributes
Descartes does not say a great deal about universals in
the Principles, but it is past doubt from what he does
say that he regards them, all of them, as mere objects
of thought, that is, as ideas in the objective sense and
hence as objective beings. True, he doesn’t quite express
this in so many words. What he says (in Article 58) is
that when number, for example, ‘is considered not in
any created things but only in the abstract or in general,
it is no more than a mode of thinking’, and the same
holds, he continues, for ‘all [the entities] we call uni-
versals’. Here the term ‘mode’ must be understood as
having the fourth of the senses I distinguished earlier,
and the phrase ‘mode of thinking’ the second of its
two senses. Even so, Descartes’s meaning is far from
obvious. But then he goes on, in Article 59, to explain
how these universals ‘come about (fiunt)’. They do so,
he says, ‘from the fact that we use one and the same
idea for thinking of all the individual [entities] which
are similar to one another’. We then ‘apply one and the
same name to all the things represented by this idea,
which name’, he says, ‘is universal’. It might appear
from this last remark that it is only the name and not
the idea that is universal. But this appearance is dis-
pelled by Descartes’s description of an example of this
process. ‘When we see two stones and attend not to their
nature but only to the fact that they are two, we form
(formamus) the idea of their number, which we call two;
and later when we see two birds or two trees and
consider not their nature but only that they are two, we
recall (repetimus) the same idea as before, which thus
is universal’. And so, he adds, ‘we designate this
number by the same universal name of two’. Hence it
121
is the idea that is the first or basic universal; and the
name is called a universal name because it designates
this idea. As for the ‘mode of thinking’ which gives rise
to the universal idea, Descartes must mean by that the
abstract or general way of thinking, the key to which
he evidently takes to be selective attention. Notice how
much like Locke Descartes sounds in this passage.
Of course the similarity between Descartes’s and
Locke’s view of universals is only partial. Locke holds
that when we ‘form’ an idea of two upon seeing two
stones, we are in effect creating that idea: it first comes
to be in our minds by the process of abstraction.
Descartes, however, believed that ideas such as that of
two are innate, having been installed in our souls by
God at the time he created them. Hence the idea of two
is already there when we see the two stones, and what
the ensuing abstraction process effects is not the
creation of that idea but merely its discovery or activa-
tion: abstraction brings it not into being but into con-
sciousness. (Descartes elaborates on this theme in his
Reply to Gassendi’s Objections at VII.382.) Descartes
does not mention his doctrine of innate ideas in his
discussion of universals, or anywhere in this part of
the Principles. But he does do so earlier in the same
work (VIIIA.9, 13), and there is no reason to suppose
that he is abandoning it here. We must therefore append
this doctrine to his account of abstraction in order to
reach a full understanding of the Cartesian theory of
universals.
Having laid out this theory in general terms,
Descartes proceeds to apply it to the ‘five common
universals’ of the Aristotelian tradition: genus, species,
differentia, property, and accident. Only the last three
of these are universals in the category of attributes; for
genus and species, as we shall see, are substance
universals (another source for my impending extrapo-
lation). But there is no reason to think that these three,
together with the constant non-principal attributes exem-
plified by number and duration, are the only universal
attributes that Descartes recognizes. There must in fact
be universal attributes in all the categories of attributes
that have been distinguished, essences as well as modes,
both uni- and omni-generic. To generate a universal
principal attribute all we have to do is think of thought
or extension ‘in general or in the abstract’; a universal
mode results when we think in this same way of imag-
ination or rectilinear motion; and so for the others.
All universals are objective beings for Descartes;
hence all actual beings are particular. This is not an
122
unusual view when the beings in question are sub-
stances. But Descartes introduces his theory of univer-
sals as a theory about attributes; and since according to
that theory only attributes in our thought are univer-
sals, the contrasting attributes in things must be partic-
ular. And this is an unusual view: not many philosophers
have held it. It may not seem implausible that some
Cartesian attributes, for example, modes such as indi-
vidual occurrent thoughts and motions of bodies, should
be regarded as particulars. But even the essence of a
particular mind, the essence that Descartes says is in
that mind, is a particular in his view; it is an attribute,
but one that is unique to that one mind. By contrast,
the essence that one mind shares with others, indeed
with all minds, is found in our thought; it is there and
only there that that universal attribute exists.
All universals are objective beings, that is, ideas in
the objective sense of the word. But it doesn’t follow
that all objective beings are universals, that is, that every
idea we have is the idea of a thing or things considered
abstractly or generally. We often do think of things indi-
vidually and as particulars, and the ideas by means of
which we do this must be particular too. This point
holds not only for particular substances – Descartes’s
sun in the sky and its objective counterpart – but also
for attributes. Since actual attributes are particular for
Descartes, and since we can think of them as such, there
must be objective attributes that are particular as well.
3. Extrapolation: universal substances
The account of universals that Descartes gives in the
Principles is cast and illustrated in terms of attributes.
But it is reasonable to extend this account to cover sub-
stances as well, as I have mentioned several times now.
Most of the details of this extrapolation can be gathered
from my chart.
Substances
uncreated created
uni-gen omni-gen uni-gen
God Substance Minds Bodies
a o o a o a
p p u u p p u p
As the chart shows, no actual substance is a uni-
versal, neither God nor any mind nor any body. But we
VERE CHAPPELL
sometimes think of these particular substances, and
when we do we have ideas of them, ideas in the objec-
tive sense, so that for each actual substance we think
of there is an objective substance existing in our mind.
Hence there are objective as well as actual substances.
Now we can think of substances individually, in which
case the ideas we have of them are as particular as they
are. Or we can think of substances generally and in the
abstract, and when we do our ideas of them are uni-
versal. We can think of the whole genus of minds or
bodies, or of some species of them, in this way, in which
case the idea we have, the universal that exists in our
thought, just is that genus or species.
Can we also apply this ‘mode of thinking’ to God;
that is, can we think of God in this abstract and general
way? If so, then when we do so think of Him, we have
a universal idea of God, an objective universal God
existing in our intellect. It may be questioned whether
we can have such an idea of God; for uniqueness is not
only a necessary property of God, it is entailed by each
of his other properties, hence by any property which is
included in any idea we have of God. But what this
means is not that we cannot think of God abstractly at
all; only that we cannot so think of him clearly and dis-
tinctly. So there is, or could be, a universal God existing
in a human mind, as my chart shows.
There is only one problem that remains to be solved,
the problem we noted earlier concerning omni-generic
substances. The problem is that there are reasons both
for and against supposing that such entities are included
in the Cartesian ontology. The main reason against sup-
posing this is that every substance Descartes mentions
– God and every mind and body – is uni-generic. Now,
however, having considered Descartes’s account of uni-
versals and the extension of that account to substances,
we can see, first, that all the substances that Descartes
mentions are particulars, and second, that there are,
besides these, substances that are universal, for example,
the genus mind or that of body. And we can also see
that there is nothing to keep Descartes from recognizing
a universal substance itself, that is, an idea of substance
which applies to all particular (created) substances, both
minds and bodies. This universal substance would
indeed be omni-generic, since it would extend to all
o
genera of substances. Hence our problem is solved if
p u Descartes does recognize this universal substance. And
I see no reason to believe that he does not.
This concludes my exposition of the Principles
passage. I turn now to the apparent discrepancy between
 DESCARTES’S ONTOLOGY
Descartes’s account of universals, including numbers
and figures, in this passage, and what he says about
mathematical objects in the Fifth Meditation.
II. The objects of mathematics
According to the Principles, universals are merely
‘modes of our thinking’, which is to say, ideas in human
minds. They are ideas in the objective sense of the word,
and hence objective beings, though Descartes does not
use this terminology here. Among the examples of uni-
versals he cites are ‘the number we call two’ and ‘the
figure . . . we call . . . triangle’. To be sure, this number
and this figure can turn up as modes of individual
material substances. But in this case they are particu-
lars, as much so as are the substances in which they
inhere. The universal two or triangle is the number or
figure considered, as Descartes says, ‘simply in the
abstract or in general, and not in any created things’
(Article 58). And it is this two and this triangle that
belong to the subject matter of pure mathematics.
In the Fifth Meditation, however, Descartes charac-
terizes the objects of ‘pure and abstract mathematics’ as
‘things which even though they may not exist anywhere
outside me still cannot be called nothing; for although
in a sense they can be thought of at will, they are not
my invention but have their own true and immutable
natures’. ‘When, for example, I imagine a triangle’, he
goes on, ‘even if perhaps no such figure exists, or has
ever existed, anywhere outside my thought, there is still
a determinate nature, or essence, or form of the triangle
which is immutable and eternal, and not invented by me
or dependent on my mind’ (VII.64). The implication of
these remarks is that, though geometrical figures may
exist in human minds, they must have some way of
being in addition to and independent of such existence:
otherwise they could not have essences which are
eternal and immutable.
This at any rate is how this passage has been inter-
preted by certain commentators, most notably Anthony
Kenny. In one article Kenny calls Descartes’s philos-
ophy of mathematics ‘thoroughly Platonic’ and declares
Descartes to be ‘the founder of modern Platonism’
(Kenny, 1970, pp. 692–693). Elsewhere Kenny com-
pares Descartes’s view of mathematical objects to that
of Meinong (Kenny, 1967, p. 155; Kenny, 1969, p. 25).
In both cases Kenny’s point is that for Descartes a
triangle, for example, has ‘a kind of being that [is]
123
sufficient to distinguish it from nothing’ (Kenny, 1970,
p. 699), but is different both from actual existence and
from existence or being in thought. Kenny calls this
third kind of being ‘being given’ (dari) (Kenny, 1969,
p. 21).
Kenny bases his case for Descartes’s Platonism (or
Meinongianism) almost entirely on the Fifth Meditation.
He makes no mention of Descartes’s discussion of uni-
versals in the Principles, so of course he takes no notice
of the conflict between its view of mathematical objects
and the one he attributes to Descartes. By contrast, Alan
Gewirth finds both Platonism and Aristotelianism in
Descartes, the one in the Fifth Meditation (and the First
Reply to Objections), the other in Principles One (and
the Fifth Reply) (Gewirth, 1970, p. 678). Gewirth’s
Platonic Descartes, however, is not the extreme realist
that Kenny’s is. Gewirth has Descartes holding that
‘mathematical entities have their own determinate
natures or essences regardless of whether any such
entities exist’ (Gewirth, 1971, p. 299), but not that these
entities enjoy some kind of being other than that of
existence, nor that they are, as Kenny puts it, ‘real
thing[s] lacking only the perfection of actual existence’
(Kenny, 1970, p. 697). Nor is Gewirth’s Aristotelian
Descartes the explicit, thoroughgoing conceptualist
that the Principles passages show him to be. To his
Descartes Gewirth attributes the ‘Aristotelian doctrines’
that ‘mathematical essences are quantitative “abstrac-
tions” from natural substances’ and that ‘mathematical
essences in their “ontological” status are not indepen-
dent of physical existents’ (Gewirth, 1970, p. 678), but
not the doctrine that these entities are ideas existing in
people’s minds. It is thus not surprising that Gewirth
finds it ‘not too difficult to reconcile [the] Aristotelian
doctrines of Descartes with his Platonic [ones]’
(Gewirth, 1971, p. 299). For the doctrines that Gewirth
has in mind are indeed logically compatible. But it is
not on account of Descartes’s holding these doctrines
that there is a conflict within his thought, at least not
the conflict that I am concerned with. Besides which,
Kenny claims that Descartes does not hold the
‘Aristotelian doctrines’ that Gewirth attributes to him;
and I agree with Kenny on that.
On Gewirth’s view of Descartes, there is no real
conflict between the Principles and the Fifth Meditation
concerning the status of mathematical objects. But
Gewirth fails to grasp the full import of Descartes’s
position, at least that of the Principles. On Kenny’s view
the conflict is real, but Kenny himself fails to address
124 VERE CHAPPELL
it: he doesn’t consider the Principles position. Another
recent scholar who has tackled these issues is Tad
Schmaltz. Unlike Kenny, Schmaltz does consider the
Principles position; and unlike Gewirth, he does under-
stand its conceptualist message, a message he rightly
associates not with Aristotle but with Gassendi and
Locke. For Schmaltz the problem is to find a reading
of Descartes that ‘avoids the Scylla of Kenny’s Platonic
interpretation without thereby falling into the Charybdis
of the abstractionist interpretation’ (Schmaltz, 1991,
pp. 162–163). By ‘abstractionist’ here Schmaltz means
‘conceptualist’, and he attributes this interpretation
– mistakenly, as I believe – to Gewirth, as well as
to Martial Gueroult. According to Schmaltz, mathe-
matical entities are neither independent real beings nor
merely ideas in human minds but something else: viz.,
immutable essences belonging to the essence of God.
Indeed, Schmaltz goes so far as to claim that Descartes
‘identifies [these] immutable essences with God
himself’ (Schmaltz, 1991, p. 135).
One might object to Schmaltz’s interpretation on the
ground that it is not the immutable essences of numbers
and figures that Descartes takes to be the objects of the
mathematician’s inquiry, but numbers and figures them-
selves, the immutable entities that have these essences.
Kenny makes the same point against Gewirth (Kenny,
1970, p. 692); and it is true that the texts of both
Meditation Five and Principles I.57–59 specify trian-
gles and not their essences as the targets of mathemat-
ical concern. (Note that by treating figures and numbers
as entities that have essences Descartes must be
regarding them as substances – abstract and universal
ones but substances nonetheless.) But this point is
hardly damaging to Schmaltz’s position. For as we have
seen, Descartes holds that an entity and its essence are
neither really nor modally distinct, and that it is only
ratione that they can even be distinguished. So the dif-
ference between saying that the mathematician studies
figures and numbers and saying that he studies the
essences of figures and numbers is inconsequential.
A more significant difficulty with Schmaltz’s inter-
pretation concerns the relationship of the mathemati-
cian’s objects to God. Schmaltz agrees with Kenny in
maintaining that such objects are, in Descartes’s view,
the creatures of God. But for Kenny Descartes takes
them, once created, to be distinct from their creator,
whereas Schmaltz’s Descartes conceives them to be
identical therewith. On this point Schmaltz cannot be
right: as Kenny points out, ‘Descartes’s mathematical
entities [must be] distinct from God, since they stand
in a causal relationship to him’ (Kenny, 1970, p. 696).
And of course Schmaltz’s Descartes is at odds with the
author of the Principles regarding the ontological locus
of numbers and figures. According to the former, such
things are in God; for the latter, they are in human
minds.
Schmaltz’s interpretation does have some virtues.
For one thing, it provides an easy explanation of the
eternality of mathematical objects, a feature Descartes
explicitly and repeatedly attributes to them. Offsetting
such advantages, however, is the fact that Schmaltz is
unable to cite a single Cartesian text in direct support
of his position. And his efforts to show that various texts
and historical precedents support his reading indirectly
are at best unconvincing, and in some cases are seri-
ously flawed.
Is there then no way of reconciling Descartes’s
account of universals in Principles I.57–59 with what
he says about the objects of mathematics in the Fifth
Meditation? Must we suppose that he held and pub-
lished two contradictory doctrines within a three-year
period – or else that he radically changed his view some
time between 1641 and 1644? My own belief is that
the doctrines in question are perfectly consistent, and
that, despite appearances, they can be reconciled,
without either violating or ignoring the plain meaning
of Descartes’s texts. I shall now proceed to show how
such reconciliation is to be accomplished.
My reconciliation project is in fact quite simple: it
can be completed in two steps. The first is to note the
close affinity that Descartes posits between the objects
of mathematics and eternal truths. In the ontological
scheme of the Principles, entities of both these kinds
are assigned to the general category of objective beings;
but the affinity I have in mind is more intimate than that.
Descartes discusses eternal truths at several places in
his writings. Outside the Principles, his most striking
claim about them is that they are created by God, and
that they would not have the content they do, or even
exist, had not God indifferently chosen to establish
them. They are, Descartes sometimes says, the product
of God’s free decrees, and they depend absolutely on
God for their being and nature. Now in a number of
passages Descartes explicitly links eternal truths to
mathematical objects. Some such truths, he is wont to
say, are truths about (Latin de) numbers and figures, or
about the essences thereof. More to our purpose, he indi-
cates that these objects, no less than the truths about
 DESCARTES’S ONTOLOGY
them, are the creatures of God. Thus in responding to
Gassendi’s Objections, he says that both ‘the essences
of things’ and ‘the mathematical truths which we can
know about them’ were ‘originally established (condita)
by’ God and hence that neither is ‘independent of ’ him
(VII.380). Again, in an early letter to Mersenne he states
that God ‘is no less the author of creatures’ essence than
he is of their existence’, and goes on to characterize this
essence as ‘nothing other than the eternal truths’ (I.151).
Both Kenny and Schmaltz, as we have seen, interpret
Descartes as definitely holding what these passages
suggest: that God has created not only truths about
triangles, for example, but triangles (or their essences)
themselves. On this point I think we must agree with
them.
The second and final step is to recall the connection
I noted earlier between Descartes’s account of univer-
sals and his doctrine of innate ideas. The former entails
that mathematical objects are objective beings, which is
to say, ideas in human minds. The latter explains how
these ideas came to be in the minds that have them,
viz. by being placed there originally by God. What I
now wish to claim is that, for Descartes, God’s creation
of numbers and figures consists in his creation of
minds containing the ideas of numbers and figures.
Mathematical objects just are ideas, according to the
ontology of the Principles; and God creates them,
according to the doctrine of innate ideas, by including
them within the minds that are the direct products of his
creative action. These ideas need not be consciously
present to the minds in which they are housed, either
from the beginning or at every moment thereafter.
They may exist originally or intermittently as uncon-
scious dispositions, as Descartes acknowledges in his
Comments on Regius’s Programma (VIIIB.357f., 361).
But doesn’t this position destroy the objectivity of math-
ematics by making its objects differ from mind to mind?
And doesn’t it render these objects mutable, since minds
grow and wither and the ideas within them change? No,
for Descartes holds that God installs the same ideas in
every mind that he creates; and no again, since the ideas
that God makes to be innate in us are constant and never
change. So the position I am attributing to Descartes
secures both the objectivity and the immutability of
mathematical objects.
If I am right about Descartes’s conception of the
objects of mathematics, then given the affinity between
them and eternal truths, what holds for the one must
hold also for the other. Hence God’s creation of the
125
eternal truths must also consist in his creation of human
minds containing such truths. We should have no trouble
extending the doctrine of innate ideas to cover eternal
truths, considering that Descartes often applies the term
‘idea’ to propositions as well as to simple concepts (cf.
III.395, 417). And in any case he frequently cites truths
– sometimes calling them ‘axioms’ or ‘common notions’
– as examples of items that we ‘are born with’ or that
have been ‘placed in’ us by God: on one occasion he
explicitly says that ‘mathematical truths . . . are all
inborn in our minds’ (I.145). So the same considerations
that account for the immutability and objectivity of the
objects of mathematics account also for the
immutability and objectivity of the truths that hold of
them, and indeed of the eternal truths in general.
This view of eternal truths bears some resemblance
to a thesis defended in a recent article by Jonathan
Bennett. Bennett’s topic is not the ontology of
Descartes’s eternal truths but their modality. His
problem is to understand how such truths can be the free
creations of God and yet be true of necessity. To solve
this problem, Bennett argues, we must attribute to
Descartes a ‘conceptualist’ or ‘subjectivist’ analysis of
modality. On this analysis the necessity of a truth is
taken to consist in our being unable to conceive its being
false, so that modal facts are reduced to facts about our
mental capacities. Hence God is responsible for these
modal facts because he is responsible for our minds’
having the capacities they do: ‘God created modal truths
by making us unable to conceive of impossibilities’
(Bennett, 1994, p. 646). Bennett’s view of Descartes’s
understanding of the modal status of eternal truths thus
parallels my view of his conception of their ontolog-
ical status; and it was in fact while reading Bennett’s
article that my view first occurred to me.4
It should be clear that the reconciliation I am
proposing is not one of compromise. I am not claiming
that Descartes’s true doctrine of mathematical objects
either combines or lies between the conceptualism of
the Principles and the Platonism of the Fifth Meditation.
Rather, I am denying that the view expressed in
Meditation Five is Platonic: I am in effect assimilating
that view to the position of the later work. And I think
a close reading of the text of Meditation Five bears me
out. Nothing in that text amounts to an explicit state-
ment that triangles have any being apart from human
minds. What is said is that a triangle may not exist
‘anywhere outside me’ or ‘outside my thought’, and that
its nature or essence is not ‘invented by me’. Descartes
126 VERE CHAPPELL
does add that the triangle’s essence is not ‘dependent on
my mind’; but what he means is merely that it is not my
own creation, or indeed the creation of any human
being. He does not in this passage make the positive
claim that this essence (and its possessor) is the creation
of God, or that it is, in that sense, dependent on God –
a claim he does make, in exactly those terms, in other
texts, as we have seen. But he does not deny, here or
anywhere, that triangles and their essences depend in
another sense on the minds in which, as ideas, they have
been created, and to which, as attributes, they belong.
‘Depend’ in this other sense stands for the relation that
any attribute bears to the substance that houses it; and
in that sense, according to the Principles, mathemat-
ical objects do depend upon human minds.
My position is that Descartes believes that mathe-
matical objects, that is, the universal numbers and
figures that constitute the subject matter of the mathe-
matical sciences, are objective beings residing in minds,
and that they have come to be where and as they are
by the creative action of God. But I am not claiming
that there are for Descartes no real numbers and figures
in the material world, and that mathematics is merely a
mental construction that is imposed arbitrarily on an
indifferent reality. On the contrary, I am sure that
Descartes believed that God creates not only minds
having mathematical ideas residing in them but also
bodies having numbers and shapes inhering in them,
bodies possessing mathematical properties and standing
in mathematical relationships. The difference is that the
products of this latter creation are particulars; and
although the mathematician’s results apply to these
entities, the true objects of his study are the universals
which are the fruits of the former creation.
I have argued that the immutability of mathematical
objects, and of eternal truths too, is provided for on the
view that I am taking of them. But Descartes maintains
that these entities are eternal as well as immutable, and
I have not yet said anything about their eternality.
Indeed, it may be objected that these entities cannot be
eternal if they really are merely ideas in human minds,
even if ideas are taken to include (the contents of ) long-
term unactualized dispositions as well as (of ) occur-
rent events. This is obvious if ‘eternal’ means ‘timeless’,
for no human mind exists outside of time. But the objec-
tion has force even if ‘eternal’ is taken, as it frequently
is by Descartes, to mean ‘sempiternal’ or ‘everlasting’.
For Descartes certainly held that no human mind has
existed from the beginning of time, even if he did
believe that every mind that is created exists forever
after its creation. This means that he would have had
to grant that there was a time at which no universal
numbers and no truths about such numbers existed,
because there were no minds for them to exist in.
Bennett avoids this objection (or its analogue) by
claiming that the term ‘eternal’ in the phrase ‘eternal
truths’ means no more than ‘unchanging’ and thus picks
out the same property that ‘immutable’ does (Bennett,
1994, pp. 663–665). I think that Bennett may be right
about this. But Descartes also speaks of God’s having
created such truths ‘from all eternity’ (I.152). This
might suggest that these truths have been around, so to
speak, either from the beginning or as long as God
himself has; and if so the objection is applicable after
all. Strictly, however, what God does from all eternity
is will or decree that the truths in question obtain, and
it is his acts of will or decrees that are contemporaneous
with him: indeed, Descartes says, these decrees are not
really distinct from God himself (V.166). But the crea-
tures that come to exist by God’s decrees, whether truths
or human minds or the whole universe, are distinct both
from God and from the pertinent decrees. (Schmaltz’s
failure to appreciate this point is one of those flaws in
his argumentation that I alluded to earlier.) And though
the decree may be issued at (or ‘before’) the beginning
of time, the creature does not begin to exist until the
decree is, as Descartes says, ‘enacted’ (V.166).
Descartes has, as far as I can see, no way of meeting
this objection without admitting that by calling them
eternal he did not mean that either the truths or the
objects of mathematics themselves exist from all
eternity. He cannot claim that these entities exist implic-
itly or potentially in God’s decrees, which are eternal in
whatever sense Descartes takes that term to have. For
these decrees are in, or rather are, God himself, and
Descartes is clear that nothing belonging to God is
implicit or potential. Nor does the Cartesian ontology
provide any place for potential or merely possible
beings as such: for Descartes, any entity that is not
actual is an objective being, and hence requires the exis-
tence of at least one human mind. I see no way, there-
fore, of allowing entities (other than God) that are
strictly and literally eternal within the confines of
Descartes’s ontology. The objection stands; but the con-
clusion I draw from it is not that either Descartes’s
ontology or my rendition of it must be rejected, but
 DESCARTES’S ONTOLOGY
rather that the objects and the truths of mathematics are
not, for Descartes, strictly and literally eternal.5
Notes
1
See Schiffer, 1976, p. 22 et passim.
2
Cottingham attributes such ‘trialism’ to Descartes in Cottingham,
1985, although he does so on the basis of texts other than this one
in the Principles. Other scholars have taken the stronger position that
Descartes is a trialist regarding, not (or not merely) attributes, but
substances, i.e. that he recognized three distinct kinds of substances,
at least in some texts; see Broughton and Mattern, 1978, Hoffman,
1986, and Schmaltz, 1992.
3
In another paper, however, I have defended the view that Descartes
is a dualist regarding substances against the claims of Hoffman et
al. that he espouses substance trialism: see Chappell, 1994.
4
Bennett has since informed me that he is ‘much in agreement’ with
my ontological extension of his position, and that he ‘strongly agrees’
with my ‘dissolution of the worry’ about the Fifth Meditation.
5
Shorter versions of this paper were read at (1) the Early Modern
Philosophy Conference, in honor of Willis Doney, at Dartmouth
College, July 1995; (2) the Sixth Annual Philosophy Conference at
the University of California, Riverside, January 1996; and (3) the
University of Western Ontario, April 1996. I am grateful to my
auditors on those occasions for helpful suggestions and criticisms.
At the Riverside Conference I was delighted to learn that views very
like mine on the status of Descartes’s mathematical objects had been
arrived at quite independently by Larry Nolan, who was then com-
pleting his dissertation at Irvine. Nolan gives an elegant statement
and a persuasive defense of these views, not only in his dissertation
(Nolan, 1997a) but in a paper (Nolan, 1997b) he had read the previous
May at a conference at Stanford, and which is now in the course of
being published.
127
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