Problems of Cartesianism (review)

~o4 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:1 JANUARY t985 had he traced the relation between Rombach and Jacobi and acknowledged what is to be learned from Jacobi somewhere besides in various endnotes. The most valuable aspect of Hopkins's polemics can be seen where Hopkins says what Nicholas's doctrine is and why it could not be what these five interpretations claim. What of Hopkins's own reading? For him, Nicholas's ideas never changed essentially from what he laid down in De docta ignorantia. Later works serve to cast light on the early masterpiece and vice versa. Cusanus does not make God and creatures different modes of one and the same being, as Jacobi would have it. Rather, God and creatures belong to ontologically different dimensions. In Hopkins's words: "The infinite and the finite are not two sides of the same reality. Instead, they are different realities----though the one is totally dependent upon the other, in an ultimate sense. The world is a contracted reflectionof God's being; but a reflection of God's being is not God's being--whether contractedly or otherwise" (98). Hopkins takes "contraction" to mean that creatures receive in a limited or restricted way a reflection of God's infinite being. Reflection or likeness does not involve resemblance here. It is rather a matter of parallel or proportion since,just as God is infinite perfection, so creatures are as perfect as they can be. God is not in the creature as he is in himself, for no original is present to its image in this way. Each creature has its own forma and essentia. Hopkins's interpretation thus sets to rest any attempt to see as Cusan doctrine some identification of God and creature. More remains to be explored regarding Nicholas's notions of contraction and participation. Nicholas's use of Neoplatonism deserves more attention here, for the genius of that tradition has been to help us think God and creatures together while always maintaining their difference. Nicholas was as concerned to explore the connection between creature and creator as to recognize their separateness. Contraction should be taken as more than mere limitation. It is among Nicholas's original metaphors aimed to help us understand our presence to God as more than mere causal dependence. If his striking images and metaphors simply say no more than that we are finite creatures, we may wonder why he bothered to use them since he was convinced that God's infinity kept him beyond the reach of our thought and language . While Hopkins's book effectively clears away five mistaken accounts, we may still await his fuller story about the meaning of Nicholas's metaphysics. Nicholas of Cusa deserves no less. CLYDE LEE MILLER SUNY, Stony Brook Thomas M. Lennon, J. M. Nicholas, and J. W. Davis, editors. Problemsof Cartesianism. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press, 1982. Pp. 253. $29.75, cloth. Cartesianism and anti-Cartesianism is the general topic of this very useful book, which is the first item in a new series entitled McGilI-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas. The emphasis is historical. Consequently, Descartes' insights, arguments, doctrines, and difficulties are discussed within the context of some facet of the BOOK REVIEWS IO 5 struggle between those who would establish and those who would suppress the "New Philosophy." Since it is an anthology, Probleng of Cartesianism is not a comprehensive account of the early fortunes of Descartes' philosophy and is not represented as being one. h does provide, however, interesting variations on the single most important theme in that account: the emerging conflict between philosophy and religion. The new scientific philosophy and the variant of it introduced by Descartes, its most celebrated and influential champion, emerged in an intellectual world dominated by religious belief. The beginning of the world, for literate Europeans, was portrayed by the Book of Genesis; the end was foretold in the Book of Daniel; God spoke to man through the words of Moses; philosophy, whether physics, ethics, or metaphysics, was still the handmaiden of theology. In the middle of the seventeenth Century, therefore, to assert the autonomy of philosophical-scientific thought was to...