Cartesian Causation Continuous Instantan PDF

CARTESIAN CAUSATION 389
Cartesian Causation:
Continuous, Instantaneous,
Overdetermined
GEOFFREY GORHAM*
1. INTRODUCTION
IN THE COURSE OF A PROTRACTED EXCHANGE of letters with Princess Elizabeth on the

subject of human happiness, and in particular the causes of Elizabeth’s own un-
happiness, Descartes counsels the very religious princess that since everything
depends on God we can “accept calmly all the things that happen to us as ex-
pressly sent by God.”1 Always an incisive critic, Elizabeth answers that we may
properly take consolation in religion when our misfortunes occur “in the ordi-
nary course of nature” (as from storms and diseases), but not when they derive
from the free actions of men—“unless,” she adds, “one could be persuaded that
God takes care to regulate even their wills [que Dieu prend le soin de regir les volontés].”2
Descartes’s rather surprising reply is that indeed God is the cause of even those
effects which depend on free actions since “he would not be supremely perfect if
anything in the world could happen without coming entirely from him.”3 In say-
1
September 15, 1645. AT 4 291; CSMK 265. Hereafter, ‘AT’ refers to Rene Descartes, Oeuvres de
Descartes, Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, ed., 11 vols. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1996); ‘CSM’ refers to The
Philosophical Writings of Descartes, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, trans., 2
vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–85); ‘CSMK’ refers to The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes: The Correspondence, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny,
trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ‘CB’ refers to Descartes’s Conversation with Bur-
man, John Cottingham, trans. and ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); ‘MD’ (followed by disputa-
tion, section, and subsection numbers) refers to Franciso J. Suarez, On Creation, Conservation, and
Concurrence: Metaphysical Disputations 20, 21, and 22, Alfred J. Freddoso, trans. (South Bend: St.
Augustine’s Press, 2001). I generally follow quite closely the translations of CSM, CSMK, CB, and MD;
otherwise the Latin or French is interpolated or cited.
2
September 30, 1645. AT 4 302.
3
October 6, 1645. AT 4 314; CSMK 272.
* Geoffrey Gorham is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Eau

Claire.
Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 42, no. 4 (2004) 389–423

[389]
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390 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 42:4 OCTOBER 2004
ing that everything comes from God, Descartes is not merely hoping to soothe the
princess with vague pieties.4 Rather, he is invoking a metaphysical thesis that has
a crucial function in his program for a mechanistic science. If God is the immu-
table and entire cause of everything that happens, then the various faculties, vital
forces, and substantial forms of scholastic science can be dispensed with as super-
fluous. As we will see, this thesis about God’s agency in the world is established by
means of a radical version of the traditional doctrine of divine conservation, which
in turn depends on a fundamental assumption about the relation between time
and causality. So Descartes’s advice to Elizabeth beautifully illustrates his famous
metaphor of knowledge as a tree, according to which metaphysical principles
provide a “root” system supporting the “trunk” of physics, from which emerges
the “branch” of morals (as well as medicine and mechanics).5 In this case, the
metaphysical roots are assumptions about the temporal relation between cause
and effect, the trunk is a purely mechanical system of physical laws, and the moral
fruit is the consolation offered to Elizabeth that religious resignation is compat-
ible with genuine human agency.
In this paper, I attempt to uncover the deep causal roots of Descartes’s model
of the relation between the actions of God and the actions of created things.6 I
begin by examining the causal assumptions at work in his novel, and somewhat
puzzling, defense of the traditional theological doctrine of continuous creation. I
will attempt to show that Descartes derives the key premise of his argument—the
independence of the parts of time—from the very simple assumption that causes
and effects are necessarily simultaneous. An important implication of this inter-
pretation is that God is the instantaneous and direct cause of everything that
happens. And this, I will argue, is precisely what his physics requires. But although
God is the cause of everything in Descartes’s world, he is not the only cause, since
Descartes considers it obvious that finite minds have the power to move bodies. In
the face of this apparent paradox, a number of commentators have suggested
4
Contrary to Garber, “Descartes and Occasionalism,” in Daniel Gareber, Descartes Embodied: Read-
ing Cartesian Philosophy Through Cartesian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 204–5.
5
AT 9B 14; CSM 1 186.
6
Although Descartes’s thinking about causation is hardly systematic, there is no question that
causal assumptions play a significant role in his philosophy and science. The most important of these
assumptions is that “whatever reality or perfection there is in a thing is present either formally or
eminently in its first and adequate cause” (AT 7 165; CSM 2 116), which is invoked in both of the
Third Meditation proofs of God’s existence (AT 7 40, 49; CSM 2 28, 34) as well as in the Sixth Medi-
tation proof of the external world (AT 7 79; CSM 2 55). In various formulations the principle is
scattered throughout Descartes’s writings: (AT 7 40–42, AT 6 34, AT 8A 11, 104, 135, 161, 165, 168,
366, AT 3 274, 428, 545; CSM 2 28–29, CSM 1 128, 198–99, 76, 97, 114, 116, 118, 252; CSMK 166,
192, 211) For discussion, see Kenneth Clatterbaugh, “Descartes’s Causal Likeness Principle,” Philo-
sophical Review, 89 (1980): 379–402, Eileen O’Neill, “Mind-Body Interaction and Metaphysical Con-
sistency: A Defense of Descartes,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 25 (1987): 227–45, and Geoffrey
Gorham, “Descartes on the Innateness of all Ideas,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 32 (2002): 355–88.
Yet there are other causal principles to which Descartes adheres as faithfully, even if he invokes them
less frequently, such as that nothing can come from nothing (AT 7 135; CSM 2 97), that whatever can
do the greater can do the lesser (AT 4 111–12; CSMK 231), and that everything has a cause. (AT 7
112; CSM 2 80) Citing the last of these, he goes so far as to argue that even God has a cause, namely
himself. (AT 7 109; CSM 2 78) For a detailed discussion of the sort of causality involved in divine self-
creation, see Daniel E. Flage and Clarence A. Bonnen, “Descartes on Causation,” The Review of Meta-
physics, 50 (1997): 841–72.
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that Descartes must have accepted the late scholastic view that God and finite
causes somehow collaborate or concur in the production of numerically identical
effects. But close examination will reveal that the case for “Cartesian concurrentism”
is weak. And in any event there is a simpler and more fruitful solution to the
problem of reconciling continuous creation and human causality in the Carte-
sian framework. We can hold that in Descartes’s world certain motions, such as
the voluntary movements of our bodies, are causally overdetermined. This account
allows Descartes to avoid occasionalism without having to embrace an elaborate
metaphysics of secondary causality. Finally, I will argue that the overdeterminist
interpretation sheds new light on two longstanding problems of Cartesian meta-
physics. First, it resolves a serious difficulty with a standard reading of Descartes’s
conception of human freedom. Second, the overdeterminist model offers a novel
approach to the old problem of reconciling genuine human action with the prin-
ciple of the conservation of total quantity of motion.
2. D E S C A RT E S’ S A R G U M E N T F O R C O N T I N U O U S C R E AT I O N
In both of the Third Meditation proofs of God’s existence, Descartes relies on the
supposedly self-evident principle that “there must be at least as much <reality> in
the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause.”7 In the first proof, the
principle is supposed to establish that only God could be the cause of our idea of
him. Reflecting on this proof, Descartes admits that “it is not so easy for me to
remember why the idea of a being more perfect than myself must necessarily
proceed from some being which is in reality more perfect.”8 So he next considers
the source of his very existence, and attempts to show that this source can be
none other than God. Part way into the argument, Descartes anticipates a pos-
sible objection: maybe I have existed forever and in that sense have no source at
all. In response, he argues that even if I have always existed, I would need to “look
for an author of my existence” at this very moment:
For a lifespan [tempus vitae] can be divided into countless parts [partes innumeras], each
completely independent of the others, so that it does not follow from the fact that I existed
a little while ago that I must exist now, unless there is some cause which as it were creates
me afresh at this moment—that is, preserves me [nisi aliqua causa me quasi rursus creet ad hoc
momentum, hoc est me conservet]. For it is quite clear to anyone who attentively considers the
nature of time [temporis naturam] that the same power and action that are needed to pre-
serve anything at each individual moment of its duration would be required to create that
thing anew if it were not yet in existence.9
The argument seems to be that given the mutual independence of the innumer-
able parts of my duration, my existence at any instant is not sufficient to ensure
my existence at any later instant. Hence, I would certainly have lapsed into noth-
ingness unless something was continuously creating me.10 This argument obvi-
7
AT 7 40; CSM 2 28.
8
AT 7 47–48; CSM 2 32–33.
9
AT 7 48–49; CSM 2 33. See also AT 6 45, AT 8A 13, AT 7 109, 165, 369–70, AT 5 53, 155; CSM
1 133, 200, CSM 2 78–79, 116, 254–55, CSMK 320, CB 15–16.
10
He goes on to argue that the since I have the idea of God, it follows from the causal principle,
and barring an infinite regress, that my continuous creator must really possess all the infinite perfec-
tion contained in that idea. (AT 7 49–51; CSM 2 54–55) This explains why Descartes says that the
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ously applies to bodies as much as finite minds, as Descartes explains in the First
Replies: “The separate divisions of time do not depend on one another. Hence the
fact that the body in question is supposed to have existed up until now ‘from itself,’
that is, without a cause, is not sufficient to make it continue to exist in the future,
unless there is some power in it that recreates it continuously as it were [continuo
veluti reproducens].”11 Since, as Descartes says, we find no such power in bodies, it
follows that the entire universe must be “recreated” by God at each instant and
that “the distinction between preservation and creation is only a conceptual one.”12
Although Descartes writes as if the need for continuous creation followed di-
rectly from a certain fact about the “nature of time,” namely that it has countless
independent parts, it is not immediately clear why this should be.13 For, to begin,
proof is merely “a more thorough explanation” of the first causal proof. (AT 7 106; CSM 2 77) For
although the second proof by itself establishes continuous creation, it relies, like the earlier proof, on the
idea of God: “It is this same idea which shows not just that I have a cause, but that this cause contains
every perfection, and hence that it is God” (AT 7 108; CSM 2 78). See also the May 2, 1644 letter to
Mesland (AT 4 112; CSMK 232) and the logical structure of the proof as exhibited in the geometrical
exposition of the Meditations arguments at the end of the Second Replies (see especially Axiom 2 and
the Demonstration of Proposition 3; AT 7 165–69; CSM 2 116–18). For a recent illuminating discus-
sion of the proof as a whole, which departs in certain respects from the brief summary just presented,
see Jorge Secada, Cartesian Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 6.
11
AT 7 110; CSM 2 79.
12
AT 7 49; CSM 2 33. As Descartes himself observes, the “merely conceptual” status of the dis-
tinction between creation and preservation is a theological commonplace: “It is certain, and it is an
opinion commonly accepted among the theologians, that the act by which God now conserves it [the
world] is just the same as that by which he created it” (AT 6 45; CSM 1 133). The reason there remains
a conceptual distinction is because a thing is thought to be created in the first instant of its existence
but merely conserved afterwards: “no less a cause is needed to preserve [ad rem conservandum] some-
thing than is needed to create it in the first place [ad ipsum primum producendum]” (AT 7 165; CSM 2
116). See n. 43 below. Suarez makes out the conceptual basis of the distinction in the same way: “there
is at least a conceptual distinction here, given that an entity (i) is not said to be conserved in the first
instant at which it is created and (ii) it is not said to be created after the first instant during the rest of
time during which it is conserved” (MD 21, 2, 7. See also MD 21, 2, 2). In order to block the objection
(which does not seem to have worried Descartes) that creation and conservation are numerically
distinct actions if they occur at different times, Suarez argues at length that “production-cum-conser-
vation” constitutes “a single indivisible action” (MD 21, 2, 3–6). Compare Descartes: “there is always a
single identical and perfectly simple act by which he simultaneously understands, wills, and accom-
plishes everything [omnia simul intelligat, velit & operetur]” (AT 8A 14; CSM 1 201).
13
Martial Gueroult has argued (along with many others) that Descartes’s doctrine of continuous
creation includes a commitment to temporal atomism, the view that time is composed of distinct,
indivisible, moments. Gueroult, Descartes’s Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons, Roger
Ariew, trans., 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 193–202. (See also Étienne
Gilson, Descartes’s Discours de la Méthode. [Paris: J. Vrin, 1925], 420, and Norman Kemp Smith, New
Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes [London: Macmillan, 1952], 202–5.) However, Gueroult’s argu-
ment seems to depend on the questionable assumption that the individual “moments” of time at
which Descartes says God creates the universe must be either indivisible atoms, or divisible “segments,”
of time. Thus, he maintains that if Cartesian moments are not indivisible, then instantaneous pro-
cesses (such as the transmission of light) would involve a real temporal movement and speed (which
Descartes denies). Against this, one may hold that the moments to which Descartes refers in the
argument for continuous creation are simply boundaries or endpoints of infinitely divisible parts of
time. This objection is mentioned by Richard Arthur, “Continuous Creation, Continuous Time: A
Refutation of the Alleged Discontinuity of Cartesian Time,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 26 (1988):
349–75, esp. 354. See also Daniel Garber, “How God Causes Motion: Descartes, Divine Sustenance
and Occasionalism,” in Descartes Embodied, 189–202, esp. 194; J.E.K Secada, “Descartes on Time and
Causality,” The Philosophical Review 99 (1990), 45–72, esp. 62–66; Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia: Natu-
ral Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 325,
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it seems to be one thing for the parts of time itself to be mutually independent, and
another for the temporal stages of things that exist in time to be independent. For
example, from the fact that the instant of time at which a fuse is lit is not the cause of
the instant of the explosion, it does not follow that the first event is not the cause of
the second. Indeed, even if the earlier instant of time somehow guaranteed the later
one, it would not guarantee that any event would later take place, or that any thing
would later exist. So the independence of the parts of time seems to tell us nothing
about the causal relations among events or temporal stages of things. In the Fifth
Set of Objections, Pierre Gassendi seems to make precisely this point against Descartes:
What difference does the dependence or independence of the parts of your duration make
to your creation or preservation? Surely these parts are merely external [externae] and fol-
low on without playing any active role. They make no more difference to your creation and
preservation than the flow or passage of particles of water in a river makes to the creation
or preservation of some rock past which it flows.14
And yet Gassendi’s objection that the parts of duration are “external” to the sub-
stances that endure could not have any force for Descartes, since he regarded the
duration of a thing as “simply a mode under which we conceive of the thing in so far
as it continues to exist.”15 In fact, “since a substance cannot cease to endure without
ceasing to be, the distinction between a substance and its duration is merely a
conceptual one,”16 and so it “involves a contradiction” to conceive of any duration
either before the creation of the world or after its annihilation.17 From this per-
spective, there is obviously no problem directly inferring the mutual independence
of the various stages of my life from the mutual independence of the parts of time in
which I live. For the parts of time in which I live are not parts of an independent
river of time. In reality, they are nothing but the successive stages of my existence.18
n.88; Harry Frankfurt, “Continuous Creation, Ontological Inertia, and the Discontinuity of Time,” in
Harry Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 66–67;
and Jonathan Bennett, Learning from Six Philosophers, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),
1: 98. I follow these philosophers in holding that Descartes’s argument for continuous creation is
neutral as to whether time is continuous or discrete. If Cartesian time is continuous, then the indi-
vidual “moments” of time at which God creates the universe are the boundaries or endpoints of the
countless, infinitely divisible, parts of time. If Cartesian time is discrete, then God creates the world
afresh at a series of distinct, indivisible, temporal atoms. For defenses of the necessary continuity of
Cartesian time, see Jean LaPorte, Le Rationalisme de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1950), 158–60 and Jean-Marie Beyssade, La Philosophie Première de Descartes (Paris: Flammarion, 1979),
especially ch. 3 and Conclusion.
14
AT 7 301; CSM 2 209–10.
15
AT 8A 26; CSM 1 211.
16
AT 8A 30; CSM 1 214. This is also the opinion of Suarez: “duratio et existentia sola ratione
distinguuntur” (Disputationes Metaphysicae, in Opera Omnia, Carolo Berton, ed. [ Paris: 1866], Disp. 50,
1, 5).
17
AT 5 343; CSMK 373.
18
Descartes’s explicit answer confirms that he does not see the relevance of Gassendi’s objection:
“You try in vain to evade my argument by talking of the ‘necessary’ connection which exists between
the parts of time considered in the abstract [inter partes temporis in abstracto considerati]. But this is not
the issue: we are considering the time or duration of the enduring thing [duratione rei durantis], and
here you would not deny that the individual moments can be separated from those immediately pre-
ceding and succeeding them, which implies that the thing which endures may cease to be at any
moment” (AT 7 370; CSM 2 255). So the duration of a thing is composed of what the Port Royal Logic
would later term ‘integral parts’: “Some things are composed of really distinct parts, called integral
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But given that my duration, which is nothing but my existence, is divisible into
countless parts, why does it follow that these “life-stages” are mutually indepen-
dent? Ordinarily, the divisibility of a thing into parts does not entail that those
parts are causally independent. For example, my body is divisible into countless
parts but my brain is not independent of my heart. Presumably, the later stages of
my life are mostly logically independent of earlier ones. But the mere logical inde-
pendence of the temporal parts of created things cannot establish continuous
creation, since earlier parts might be causally sufficient for later ones even if they
do not entail them.19 Thus, if I am bitten by a venomous snake I do not need to
suppose that it is God who makes me ill: the poison is quite enough, even if I
might not have been affected at all. Similarly, earlier stages of my life might be
called upon to produce (if not entail) later stages.20
Descartes’s view must therefore be that my life-stages are all independent in
the sense that no given life-stage is causally sufficient for the next. But why believe
that? The answer most frequently given in recent Descartes commentary is that
such things as life-stages are not powerful enough to be the sufficient causes of
their successors. In the Principles of Philosophy Descartes says: “we easily understand
that there is no power in us enabling us to keep ourselves in existence.”21 And in
the Fifth Replies he makes it clear what sort of power we would need: “you are
attributing to a created thing the perfection of a creator if the created thing is
able to continue existence independently of anything else.”22 Since we are not
creators, certainly not creators of future stages of ourselves, we cannot be causally
sufficient for our continued existence.23
The problem with this reading of Descartes’s argument for continuous cre-
ation is that it assumes that life-stages could be causally sufficient for subsequent
life-stages only by literally creating those later stages. But why couldn’t I causally
ensure my future existence, without divine assistance, by some less extravagant
method than creating my subsequent life-stage ex nihilo? I might, for example,
parts, such as the human body and different parts of a number” (Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole,
Logic or the Art of Thinking, Jill Vance Buroker, trans. and ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996], 27). This seems to imply, in turn, that my duration is composed of temporal parts that are
substances in their own right. For further discussion, see n. 40 below.
19
Unless one were to suppose that causal necessity implies logical necessity. But, as Jonathan
Bennett observes, there is “no evidence that Descartes accepted this” (Learning from Six Philosophers, 1: 97).
20
Yet this seems to be how Étienne Gilson understands the argument: “the existence or state of a
thing at one moment does not in itself provide a sufficient reason for the existence or state of the
thing in the very next instant,” (Descartes’s Discours de la Méthode, 340). Similarly, Richard Arthur writes:
“According to Descartes, the world, created by God with a certain force in the very first moment of
time, requires the same force and action to keep it in existence at each subsequent moment since
there is no principle inherent in any substance by which its existence at a later time might follow from
its existence at any earlier time” (“Continuous Creation, Continuous Time,” 352). See also Frankfurt,
“Continuous Creation, Ontological Inertia, and the Discontinuity of Time,” 66.
21
AT 8A 13; CSM 1 200.
22
AT 7 370; CSM 2 255. See also AT 7 118; CSM 2 84, where the same point is made about bodies.
23
This interpretation of the argument is suggested by Jonathan Bennett, Learning from Six Philoso-
phers, 1: 97–98; Daniel Garber, Descartes’s Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), 264; Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (London: Penguin Press, 1978),
149; Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1968), 144; Norman
Smith, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 129–30; and Harry
Frankfurt, “Continuous Creation, Ontological Inertia, and the Discontinuity of Time,” 62–63.
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simply undertake measures to prevent my annihilation in the next instant (eat,
drink, avoid ingesting poison, and so on). If I am responsible for my future exist-
ence, it may be in the way the sun is responsible for the continued being of a
plant: by preservation rather than creation.24 It is true, of course, that I would
need to accomplish something like continuous self-creation ex nihilo in order to
preserve myself if I were continuously lapsing into nothingness. But the latter is
precisely what is in dispute: whether I can be preserved only by being created.
Hence, the assumption that self-preservation must involve a kind of self-creation
simply begs the question whether I, and the rest of the universe, need to be con-
tinuously recreated.
In fact, the suggestion that the causal independence of the parts of my dura-
tion is derived from my lack of self-creative power seems to reverse Descartes’s
own logic. Thus, in the “geometrical exposition” of the Meditations, which is ap-
pended to the Second Replies, Descartes says that I must not have the power of
preserving myself since, if I did, I would now have the power to give myself every
perfection (Proposition III).25 But he states that this inference itself depends on
the assumption that it is not a greater thing to preserve a substance than to create
it (Axiom IX),26 which in turn depends on the assumption that “there is no rela-
tion of dependence between the present time and the immediately preceding
time” (Axiom II).27 The geometrical exposition thus makes it clear that the con-
ception of self-preservation as a kind of self-creation, along with its consequence
that I cannot preserve myself, are derived from the doctrine of the causal inde-
pendence of the parts of duration, not vice-versa.
Even if I were capable of self-creation, it does not seem to follow that I would
be capable of self-preservation. For perhaps I am for some reason able to create
the present life-stage, but not now (or ever) able to create any later life-stage.28 So
what is particularly needed in order to make sense of the argument for continu-
ous creation is an explanation for why I cannot now cause myself to continue to
be in the next part of time. In order to achieve such an explanation, I think it is
24
In the terminology of Suarez, I might be able to conserve myself per accidens (by protecting
myself from danger) or per se mediate (by providing nourishment for myself), rather than per se immediata
(by giving myself esse) (MD 21, 3, 2).
25
AT 7 168; CSM 2 118. See also AT 7 48; CSM 2 33.
26
AT 7 166; CSM 2 117.
27
AT 7 165; CSM 2 116. There is one other reason mentioned by Descartes why I am not the
cause of my future existence: “if there were such a power in me I should undoubtedly be aware of it”
(AT 7 49; CSM 2 34). But this point has weight only if in order to preserve myself I must have the
power of self-creation, since I am conscious of a power to preserve myself in the weak sense of avoiding
what would annihilate me. That is why this point follows the argument for continuous creation based
on the independence of the parts of my duration. It is worth noting also that the inference from the
non-awareness of a power of self-preservation to the non-existence of such a power is dropped from
the Principles version of the proof, which suggests that Descartes did not regard it as essential in order
to establish that I am not the cause of future stages of myself. In the Principles version, after granting
himself the usual point about the independence of the parts of time, he says simply: “We easily under-
stand that there is no power in us enabling us to keep ourselves in existence [facile enim intelligimus
nullum vim esse in nobis, per quam nos ipsos conservemus]” (AT 8A 13; CSM 1 200).
28
Indeed, Descartes develops a notion of instantaneous self-creation in the First and Fourth
Replies, where he tries to show that God could be the efficient cause of himself even though in this
case the cause and effect are identical and simultaneous. See AT 7 108–11, 231–45; CSM 2 78–80,
162–67.
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important to remember Descartes’s remark that his argument will be persuasive
to anyone who “attentively considers the nature of time.”29 To divide the duration
of a thing into parts is necessarily to mark out non-simultaneous parts of time, just
as to divide a body is necessarily to mark out non-coincidental regions of three-
dimensional extension. Hence, when Descartes says that our life-span can be di-
vided into countless parts, he is claiming that our life has an indefinite number of
non-simultaneous temporal stages.30 The reason he directly inferred from this
that no life-stage is causally sufficient for any subsequent life-stage is simply be-
cause he held that causes are necessarily simultaneous with (or at least not prior
to) their effects:
The natural light does not establish that the concept of an efficient cause requires that it
be prior in time to its effect. On the contrary, the concept of a cause is strictly speaking
applicable only for so long as the cause is producing the effect, and so it is not prior to it
[non proprie habet rationem causae, nisi quandiu producit effectum, nec proinde illo est prior].31
If a cause cannot be prior to its effect, and my life is divisible into countless non-
simultaneous stages, it follows that no stage can be causally sufficient for any later
stage. Therefore, if we assume, as Descartes does, that everything has a cause, I
must look for an external reason for my persistence.32
29
AT 7 49; CSM 2 33.
30
This assumption is made explicit in the version of the argument presented in the Principles:
“For the nature of time is such that its parts are not mutually dependent, and never exist at the same
time [nec unquam simul existant]” (AT 8A 13; CSM 1 200). In speaking so frequently and casually of the
parts of the duration of created things, Descartes seems to be relying on the standard late scholastic
distinction between absolute and successive duration-sive-existence. Permanent duration is “all at once,”
while successive duration has parts. For a detailed discussion, including a sub-division of the various
kinds of permanent duration, see Suarez, Disputationes Metaphysicae, Disp. 50, 3–6. On at least one
occasion, Descartes makes explicit his reliance on the permanent/successive distinction in his argu-
ment for the independence of the parts of my duration: “Even if no bodies existed, it could still not be
said that the duration of the human mind was entirely simultaneous [tota simul] like the duration of
God; because our thoughts display a successiveness [successio in cognitationibus nostris] which cannot be
found in the divine thoughts. We clearly understand that it is possible for me to exist at one moment,
while I am thinking of one thing, and yet not exist at the very next moment, when, if I exist at all, I may
think of something quite different” (AT 5 193; CSMK 355).
31
AT 7 108; CSM 2 78. He repeats the point, without elaborating, in the Fourth Replies (AT 7
240; CSM 2 167).
32
This is precisely how Jonathan Edwards attempted to demonstrate continuous creation one
hundred years later in his treatise on Original Sin: “the prior existence [of a thing] can no more be the
proper cause of the new existence, in the next moment, or next part of space, than if it had been in an
age before, or at a thousand miles distance, without any existence to fill up the intermediate time or
space. Therefore the existence of created substances, in each successive moment, must be the effect of
the immediate agency, will, and power of God” (Works of Jonathan Edwards, Clyde A. Holbrook, ed., vol.
3. [New Haven: Yale University Press], 401). Descartes’s own defense of the causal simultaneity condi-
tion is disappointingly brief. He says that the concept of a cause applies only when something is actu-
ally producing its effect. But why does the effect need to be produced instantaneously? Like Edwards,
he seems to have considered diachronic causal processes as unintelligible in the same way as action at
a (spatial) distance: something can no more act when it is not than where it is not. Thus, in a letter to the
so-called Hyperaspites (August, 1641) he argues that the “whip” cannot be considered to be the cause
of the continued spinning of the top: “For I admit that I am not subtle enough to understand how
something that is present can be acted upon by something else that is not present—which may indeed
be supposed not to exist anymore, like the whip if it should cease to exist after whipping the top” (AT
3 428; CSMK 193). Another possible justification appeals to the principle of sufficient reason: if the
effect is any later than the cause then something else must have been needed to produce the effect.
42.4gorham. 396 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

I have argued that Descartes derives the principle of the independence of the
parts of time simply from the condition of causal simultaneity.33 Yet in an impor-
tant discussion of Descartes’s views on time and causality, J. E. K. Secada has claimed
that the simultaneity condition is not sufficient to establish the thesis about the
parts of time, and that Descartes relied tacitly on other causal assumptions in the
argument for continuous creation. Secada works with the following definitions:
1. Segments of time A and B are separate if and only if there is no time which
belongs to both A and B.
2. Segment of time A is causally active upon segment B if and only if there is
something existing during A which is the cause of something existing during B.
(Being causally dependent is the inverse relation of being causally active.)
3. Segment of time A is causally independent of segment B if and only if A is
neither causally active nor causally dependent on B.34
Given these definitions, Secada takes Descartes’s crucial claim about time and
causation to be: “All time can be divided into separate segments such that for any two
segments, one is causally independent of the other.”35 However, Secada argues, this
claim cannot be derived simply from the condition of causal simultaneity. For consider
separate segments of time A and C, which are “spanned” by segment of time B:
Thus, Hume observes: “Tis an establish’d maxim in both natural and moral philosophy that an object
which exists for any time in its full perfection without producing another, is not its sole cause” (David
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed., 2nd edition revised by P.H. Nidditch [Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1978], 76). This sort of explanation for the principle is suggested by
Edwin Curley, Descartes Against the Skeptics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 140. Finally,
one might hold that the condition of causal simultaneity itself depends on the thesis of the causal
independence of the parts of time, the idea being that causes cannot come before their effects because
if they did then one part of time would be causally related to another. But the brief argument given by
Descartes for the necessity of causal simultaneity seems to depend only on what the natural light reveals
about the “concept of a cause” (rationem causae), rather than on any substantive thesis about the causal
structure of time. As the remark to Hyperaspites just quoted suggests, Descartes’s objection to diachronic
causation is simply that it allegedly involves the incoherent notion that something could act when it is
not present and may not exist. But if his concern about such causation were based on the causal
independence of the parts of time, then his objection would be simply that the cause is at an earlier
time, rather than that it may not exist at all. On the ancient and medieval ancestry of the condition of
causal simultaneity, see William A. Wallace, “Aquinas on the Temporal Relation between Cause and
Effect,” Review of Metaphysics 27 (1974): 569–84 and Secada, “Descartes on Time and Causality,” 49–
51. For a detailed philosophical analysis, see Myles Brand, “Simultaneous Causation,” in Time and
Cause: Essays Presented to Richard Taylor, Peter van Inwagen, ed. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980), 137–53.
33
This interpretation is also defended, in much less detail, by Curley, Descartes Against the Skeptics,
139–40. Note that I will use the term ‘condition of causal simultaneity’ for convenience, though it is
slightly misleading. Strictly speaking, the condition is that the cause is “not prior” to the effect. So it
will be satisfied by causes which are not simultaneous with the effect so long as they are not temporal
at all (as might be the case with God’s volitions).
34
Secada, “Descartes on Time and Causality,” 47.
35
Ibid.
42.4gorham. 397 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

Now suppose something in A instantaneously causes something to exist at the
beginning of the segment B. The thing produced in B later instantaneously causes
something to exist during the segment C, perhaps at the end of B. Secada argues
that although all of the causal links involved in this process are instantaneous, the
separate time segments A and C are not causally independent. For since some-
thing in A is the cause of something in B, which is in turn the cause of something
in C, it follows by the transitivity of causation that something in A is a cause of
something in C. Secada writes:
Now it could be argued that while a cause must be simultaneous with its effect while pro-
ducing it, the effect could itself produce another effect at a later date and the transitivity of
causality requires the first to be a cause of the last. This is, in fact, the crux of the objection
being considered. It shows how merely from the requirement of simultaneity and the obvi-
ous claim that the separate segments of time are never simultaneous the principle [of the
independence of the separate segments of time] cannot be obtained.36
Secada goes on to argue that in order to derive the independence principle

Descartes must also rely on a very strong version of the principle that everything
has a cause: “substances must be produced at all times during which they exist.”37
But there are problems both with the objection, and with Secada’s response to
it. First, from the fact that a thing produced in A later produces something in C, it
does not follow that A is causally active on C, i.e., that A and C are not causally
independent. For the segment B can itself be divided into parts at the very point
that separates A and C. The condition of causal simultaneity then entails that
nothing in the first segment of B, produces anything in the second segment of B,
since in that case a cause would be prior to its effect. And from this it follows that
A and C are causally independent after all, despite the fact that B spans them. The
same argument could be applied to any attempt to span the parts of B itself since,
as Descartes observes, the duration of a thing can be divided into “countless parts.”
To revive the objection, one might insist that the parts of the duration of a given
enduring substance, such as the thing first produced in A, cannot be causally
independent of one another. But that would simply beg the question against
Descartes’s argument for continuous creation. Or one could insist that the thing
which persists through B does not involve a causal process and so does not violate
the condition of causal simultaneity. But then the objection cannot rely on the
transitivity of causality in order to establish a causal connection between A and C.
So, Secada’s objection does not show that in order to establish that the parts of
time are causally independent Descartes must invoke, in addition to the condi-
tion of causal simultaneity, the principle that something must be produced at all
times during which it exists. But perhaps one can call upon a slightly different
reason for insisting on the principle of strong universal causation.38 Without the
principle it is possible for a given event or stage of a thing E to exist at a given time
without being caused at that time. But then all events and stages could exist with-
36
“Descartes on Time and Causality,” 67.
37
38
This sort of reason arose in personal correspondence with Secada, though I do not suggest that
it is a reason he would endorse.
42.4gorham. 398 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

out causes so that, even assuming the condition of causal simultaneity, there would
be no need to invoke a continuous creator—the world could consist of a sequence
of uncaused instantaneous events or stages. What this version of the objection
ignores is that Descartes assumes that everything has a cause,39 which suffices to
block the threat of an unconnected series of uncaused events without having to
introduce the additional principle that things are always being produced at any
time they exist. This explains why Descartes thinks it is sufficient in order to dem-
onstrate continuous creation that things cannot be the cause of their subsequent
existence. Thus he writes: “Now I regard the divisions of time as being separable
from each other, so the fact that I now exist does not imply that I shall continue to
exist unless there is a cause which creates me afresh, as it were, at each moment of
time.”40 Indeed, if Secada were right that for Descartes it is evident that “it is the
existence of a substance at some time that requires a simultaneous cause”41 then
it would be hard to explain why he always appeals to the independence of the
countless parts of my duration in the argument for continuous creation. For it
39
AT 7 112, 165; CSM 2 80, 116.
40
AT 7 109; CSM 2 78–79. See also AT 7 49, 370; CSM 2 33, 255. In a recent article, Clarence
Bonnen and Daniel Flage have posed an interesting problem for Descartes’s doctrine of continuous
creation. Given two things are really distinct if one can exist without the other (AT 7 162; CSM 2 114),
it looks like every part of the duration of a thing is a really distinct substance since every part is “com-
pletely independent” (AT 7 49; CSM 2 33). As Bonnen and Flage put it: “neither minds nor bodies are
simple substances; instead temporal cross-sections of minds and bodies are substantial: each depends
for its existence on God and nothing else.” Clarence A. Bonnen and Daniel E. Flage, “Descartes: the
Matter of Time,” International Studies in Philosophy 32 (2000) 1–11, see 4. (A similar problem was
raised much earlier by Pierre Bayle who wrote in his Dictionaire: “How do you know that this very
morning God did not allow that soul, which he continually created from the very first moments of
your life until now, to fall back into nothingness? How do you know he has not created another soul
with modifications like the ones yours had?” [Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, Richard H.
Popkin, trans. and ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 204]. See also Bennett, Learning from Six
Philosophers, 1: 97–98.) A full treatment of this problem would require discussion of a broad range of
issues in Cartesian metaphysics going far beyond the scope of this paper, including individuation,
substance, essence, and the knowledge and identity of the soul. But I will briefly mention three pos-
sible lines of approach to the problem, none of which is without difficulty. One could hold with Bonnen
and Flage that minds (and bodies) do not really endure at all since “time as such is not part of the
material or immaterial world” (“Descartes, The Matter of Time,” 5). This approach has, I think, the
disadvantage of undermining the entire (second causal) proof of God’s existence, which turns on the
“nature of time” as we have just seen. According to Descartes, the reason I must look for an author of
my existence at this very moment, even if I have lived forever, is because the parts of my duration are
independent. But why should I need to call on God to account for my continued duration if that
duration is subjective or illusory? Alternatively, one could conclude that Cartesian minds are really not
simple substances. This is how Jonathan Bennett responds to the problem: “Descartes ought to hold
that that what we call a single enduring mind or body is really a series of ontologically distinct things
which compose a kind of pseudo-substance because of their qualitative and spatio-temporal continu-
ity” (Learning from Six Philosophers, 1: 98). The problem with this “Lockean” account of the endurance
of the mind is that it seems to run contrary to Descartes’s insistence that the mind is “something quite
single and complete” (AT 7 86; CSM 2 59). Finally, it might be possible to hold that although the
duration of a mind is composed of substantial temporal parts, the essences or natures of individual
human minds are not divisible into temporal parts. Descartes’s reported remark to Burman may sup-
port this: “Thought will indeed be extended and divisible with respect to its duration [durationem],
since its duration can be divided into parts. But it is not extended and divisible with respect to its
nature [naturam] since its nature remains unextended” (AT 5 149; CSMK 335). This account would
imply that minds are simple and indivisible as essences but not as enduring substances.
41
42.4gorham. 399 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

follows immediately from Secada’s principle that I now and always require a si-
multaneous cause of my existence, regardless of any facts about temporis naturam.42
3. C O N T I N U O U S C R E AT I O N A N D T H E M AT E R I A L W O R L D
I have so far argued that Descartes relies on the condition of simultaneous causa-
tion in his argument for continuous recreation. I would now like to investigate
the role of these interrelated causal doctrines in Cartesian physics and metaphys-
ics.43 We can begin to appreciate the implications of the principle of simulta-
neous causation by briefly examining an objection raised by Hume. In defense of
his own view that causes are temporally contiguous with their effects, Hume ar-
gued that the demand for simultaneity of cause and effect threatened to make
everything simultaneous:
The consequence of this [simultaneous causation] would be no less than the destruction
of that succession of causes which we observe in the world; and indeed the utter annihila-
tion of time. For if one cause were co-temporary with its effect, and this with its effect, and
so on, tis plain there wou’d be no such thing as succession, and all objects must be co-
existent.44
But the absurd conclusion does not follow at all. Certainly, if causes produce their
effects instantaneously, then all the events in a given causal chain must occur at
the same time. Furthermore, if two causal chains intersect at any point, then all
the events in both chains will be simultaneous since in that case a link in one
42
It is this singular reliance on the “nature of time” that distinguishes Descartes’s argument for
continuous creation from similar late scholastic arguments. For example, Suarez (elaborating on
Aquinas) says that if something requires the influence of a First Agent to exist in reality at some given
time, then it requires that same influence at any other time when it exists (MD 21, 1, 12). But this will
not do for Descartes’s purposes since it assumes that I was given existence at some time, whereas
Descartes wants to establish the need for a creator even if “I have always existed as I do now” (AT 7 48;
CSM 2 33). To insist that I could not have always existed without being created by God begs the
question against the possibility of some kind of perpetual self-preservation. So Descartes invokes the
doctrine of the independence of the parts of time in order to establish that I cannot call upon earlier
stages of myself in order to account for my current existence.
43
Peter McGlaughlin maintains that it is “entirely inconsequential” to Descartes’s science that
the distinction between preservation and creation is not a real distinction but merely a conceptual
distinction (AT 7 49; CSM 2 33), since there can be distinctions between parameters which even if not
“really distinct” in Descartes’s sense are nevertheless importantly different from a scientific perspec-
tive, such as between my height and my weight. Peter McLaughlin, “Descartes on Mind-Body Interac-
tion and the Conservation of Motion,” Philosophical Review 102 (1993):155–82, see 178. I am not sure
why McLaughlin mentions height vs. weight, since this is an instance of what Descartes calls a “modal
distinction”—“a distinction between two modes of the same substance” (AT 8A 29; CSM 1 214)—
whereas the very different conceptual distinction is between two attributes such that “we are unable to
perceive clearly the idea of one of the two attributes if we separate it from the other” (AT 8A 30; CSM
1 214). As an example of a modal distinction Descartes mentions motion and shape (AT 8A 29; CSM
1 214). As an example of a conceptual distinction he mentions extension and divisibility, which do not
differ from one another “except in so far as we sometimes think confusedly of one without thinking of
the other” (AT 9B 53; CSM 1 215, n.1; see also AT 4 351–52; CSMK 280–81). Thus, a conceptual
distinction does not correspond to any distinction in things or attributes, but merely arises from a
confusion in our thought. (For a good recent discussion, see Jorge Secada, Cartesian Metaphysics,194–
98.) So as far as the act itself is concerned there is no difference at all between preservation and
creation. That is what Descartes says again and again (AT 6 45, AT 8A 62, AT 7 165, 368; CSM 1 133,
240, CSM 2 116, 254–65). See also n. 12 above.
44
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 76.
42.4gorham. 400 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

chain is the cause or effect of a link in the other.45 Hence, one can accept the
condition of causal simultaneity and still save the manifest phenomenon of the
temporal succession of events, so long as one is prepared to accept that all succes-
sive events are causally isolated from one another. And we have already seen that
Descartes himself is happy to accept diachronic causal isolation, along with what
he took to be its theological implications.46
The Humean might object at this point that the condition of causal simultane-
ity cannot account for the asymmetry of causation. The worry is that if two events
are simultaneous, there will be no way of distinguishing the cause from the effect.
But on this matter, Descartes adopts a standard scholastic line: although instanta-
neous causes are not temporally prior to their effects, they are nevertheless prior
in the sense that the effects are “dependent upon” the causes, and not vice-versa.
Thus, he says that although a light ray from the sun illuminates the earth instanta-
neously, “‘instantaneous’ excludes only temporal priority; it is compatible with
each of the lower parts of a ray of light being dependent on all the upper ones.”47
Let us now consider how the condition of causal simultaneity is at work in
Descartes’s mechanistic conception of the material world. Certainly, he was con-
vinced that various kinds of bodily effects are simultaneous with what we take to
be their physical causes. For example, in the Treatise on Man he explains how fire
can trigger an immediate pain reflex in the body through the nerves “just as when
you pull one end of a string you cause a bell hanging at the other end to ring at
the same time.”48 And he often claimed that light from the sun illuminates the
earth instantaneously, just as movement in one end of a rigid body instantaneously
produces movement in the other end.49 But it is important to recognize that such
cases of simultaneous causation do not involve instantaneous motion, since Descartes
thinks motion never takes place in an instant.50 He tries to make this clear in a
dispute with his former teacher Beeckman: “I said recently, when we were to-
gether, that indeed light does not move instantaneously, as you say, but (what you
45
Hume’s conclusion would follow if all events could be causally traced back to a first act of
creation. But in Descartes’s philosophy, God creates the world not only at the beginning but at all times.
46
To be fair, Hume himself does not put much stock in his objection: “If this argument appears
satisfactory, ‘tis well. If not, I beg the reader to grant me the same liberty, which I have used in the
preceding case, of supposing it such. For he shall find, that the affair is of no great importance”
(Treatise of Human Nature, 76). The “preceding case” to which Hume refers is that of the spatial conti-
guity of cause and effect. In that case, his tentative conclusion is that spatial contiguity is essential to
causation, at least “til we find a more proper occasion to clear up this matter” (ibid., 75). When the
occasion later arises (Bk. I, Part IV, Sect. 5), Hume points out that spatial contiguity cannot be satisfied
when the effects are sensations since our perceptions (aside from those of sight and feeling) do not
have spatial properties: “a moral reflection cannot be placed on the right or the left hand of a passion,
nor can a smell or sound be either of a circular or square figure” (ibid., 236). But in such cases there
will still be “a contiguity in the time of their appearance” even if there can be no spatial contiguity
(ibid., 237). Since he continues to rely on temporal contiguity in the account of sensation, the reader
may regret having earlier granted Hume the “liberty” of supposing the adequacy of his argument for
the priority of cause to effect.
47
AT 2 143; CSMK 103–4. See also AT 1 451; CSMK 74.
48
AT 11 142; CSM 1 101. See also the description of muscular activity in the Passions of the Soul 1,
7 (AT 11 332; CSM 1 330).
49
AT 6 84; CSM 1 153. See also AT 10 402, AT 1 307, 417, 451, AT 2 42, 203–11, 363–64, 384;
CSM 1 34, CSMK 45–46, 63, 74, 100, 108–10, 121, 126.
50
AT 11 45AT; AT 8A 64; CSM 1 97; CSM 1 242.
42.4gorham. 401 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

regard as the same thing) that it instantaneously arrives at the eye from the body
which emits it.”51 And to Pollot: “ I did not say that light was extended like a stick
but like the actions or movements transmitted by a stick. And although the move-
ment does not take place instantaneously, each of its parts can be felt at one end
of the stick at the very moment (that is to say, at exactly the same time) that it is
produced at the other end.”52 Hence, various physical processes are instantaneous
even if nothing can instantaneously move.
And yet Descartes’s theory of collision might seem to require instantaneous
motion, if we hold strictly to the condition of causal simultaneity. Descartes con-
ceived of motion as simply the “translation” (tanslationem) of a body or part of a
body from contact with one set of bodies to contact with another,53 while collision
typically involves the “transfer” (transfert) or “transmission” (transmitttunt) of some
quantity of motion from one body to another.54 Suppose then that in a collision
one body causes the translation of another body to some other vicinity. But then
either the first body causes the second body to be instantaneously translated to its
new vicinity, contrary to experience and the prohibition against instantaneous
motion, or the action of the first body results in a later movement of the second
body, contrary to the condition of causal simultaneity. The answer to this problem
is simply that in collisions the exchanges or “transfers” of motion, and the subse-
quent translations of bodies, are not produced by the bodies themselves, but rather
by God through his continual conservation/creation of the world. Thus the proof
of the second part of the law of collision (“If one body collides with a weaker body
it loses a quantity of motion equal to that which it imparts to the other body”)
states:
For the whole of space is filled with bodies, and the motion of every single body is rectilin-
ear in tendency. Hence, it is clear that when he created the world in the beginning, God
did not only impart various motions to different parts of the world, but also produced all
the reciprocal impulses and transfers of motion between the parts. Thus, since God con-
serves the world by the selfsame actions and in accordance with the selfsame laws as when
he created it, the motion which he preserves is not something permanently fixed in given
pieces of matter, but is something which is mutually transferred when collisions occur.55
God himself produces all the impulses and transfers of motion between colliding
bodies, just as he did in the beginning, since he does the same thing now as he did
then. This model of physical interaction resolves the apparent conflict between
the condition of causal simultaneity and the prohibition against instantaneous
51
AT 1 307; CSMK 45–46.
52
AT 2 42; CSMK 100. See also AT 10 402, AT 203–11; CSM 1 34, CSMK 108–10.
53
AT 8A 53; CSM 1 233. See also AT 5 403; CSMK 381: “The translation which I call ‘motion’ . . .
[Translatio illa quam ‘motum’ voco . . .].”
54
AT 8A 65; CSM 1 242.
55
“Cum enim omnia corporibus sint plena & nihilominus uniuscujusque corporis motus tendat
in lineam rectum, perspicuum est Deum ab initio mundum creando, non modo dervsas, ejus partes
diversimode movisse, sed simul etiam effecisse ut unae alias impellerent motusque suos in illas
tranferrent: adeo ut iam ipsum conservando eadam actione, ac cum iisdem legibus cum quibus creavit,
motum , non iisdem materiae partibus semper infixum, sed ex unus in alias prout sibi mutuo occur-
rent transeuntem, conservat” (AT 8A 66; CSM 1 243). See also AT 11 43, AT 6 45, AT 8A 62, 63–64,
100, AT 4 328, AT 5 404; CSM 1 96, 133, 240, 242, 256, CSMK 275, 381.
42.4gorham. 402 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

motion. For the impulses and transfers involved in physical collisions come en-
tirely from God, whose actions are both instantaneous and continuous.56
4. R E C O N C I L I N G C O N T I N U O U S C R E AT I O N A N D
H U M A N A C T I O N : C O N C U R R E N C E V S . O V E R D E T E R M I N AT I O N
I turn now from strictly physical collisions to mind-body interaction. Can finite
minds find a place in the causal nexus compatible with the doctrine of continu-
ous creation and the requirement of causal simultaneity? Of the two cases to con-
sider, body —> mind causation (sensation) and mind —> body causation (volun-
tary movement), I will focus here on voluntary movement.57 That our minds are
capable of moving bodies (our own bodies) by conscious acts of the will was some-
thing Descartes took to be perfectly evident:
That the mind, which is incorporeal, can set the body in motion, is something which is
shown to us not by any reasoning or comparison with other matters, but by the surest and
plainest experience. It is one of those self-evident things which we only make obscure
when we try to explain them in terms of other things.58
In contrast to purely physical interaction, Descartes does not hold that the causal
power of human minds is merely a manifestation of God’s continuous creation/
conservation of transfers and impulses. Rather, he seems to think that humans
are on a par with God in their ability to produce motion, as he suggests to More:
“The power of causing motion may be the power of God himself preserving the
transfer in matter as he put it in the first moment of creation; or it may be the
56
In a recent discussion Stephen Gaukroger correctly states (without elaborating) that the Third
Meditation proof of our dependence on God is based on the condition of causal simultaneity. But he
goes on to suggest that physical processes do not satisfy this principle: “Descartes believed that bodies
remained in inertial states, such as rectilinear motion, without external causes and it is because of this
that later states can result from earlier ones, even though they are not in temporal proximity: as a
result of a collision, for example, the inertial state of a body may be caused to change, but it will
remain in this changed inertial state at all later times unless it enters into another causal interaction”
(Descartes’s System of Natural Philosophy [Cambridge University Press, 2002], 78, n.15). This leads
Gaukroger to wonder how Descartes can allow diachronic causation in the case of physical interaction
without allowing it in the case of existence per se. But, as our discussion indicates, this worry is mis-
placed. According to Descartes, the laws of nature, including inertial laws, hold only because God
must always recreate the universe. Thus, in justifying the law of rectilinear motion in Le Monde, Descartes
says “it depends solely on God’s preserving each thing by a continuous action, and consequently on
his preserving it not as it might have been some earlier time but precisely as it is at the very instant that
he preserves it” (AT 11 44–45; CSM 1 96–97). And he proceeds to explain that this does not mean
that rectilinear motion takes place in an instant “but that everything that is required to produce it is
present at each instant” (ibid.). See also Principles 2 39 (AT 8A 63–64; CSM 1 241–42). The reason any
given body persists in its inertial state is entirely because of God’s immutable action, not because of
some earlier collision. So the condition of causal simultaneity, far from being violated by Descartes’s
laws of nature, is actually presupposed by those laws. For detailed discussions of God as the cause of all
motions in the physical world see Gary Hatfield, “Force (God) in Descartes’s Physics,” Studies in the
History and Philosophy of Science 10 (1979): 113–40, and Garber, “How God Causes Motion: Descartes,
Divine Sustenance and Occasionalism” in Descartes Embodied.
57
Regarding, body —> mind causation, I have argued elsewhere that Descartes comes to believe
that bodies are not the efficient causes of sensory ideas. See Gorham, “Descartes on the Innateness of
all Ideas.”
58
AT 5 222; CSMK 358.
42.4gorham. 403 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

power of a created substance, like our mind . . .”59 He even says that the only idea
we can have of God’s power to move bodies is derived from the idea we have of
our own power to do the same.60
Attributing to finite minds a real power to move bodies is consistent with the
condition of causal simultaneity. Indeed, in the framework of Cartesian dualism, it
is quite natural to suppose that the initiation of voluntary movement takes no time
at all. According to Descartes’s physiology, all voluntary movements of the body can
be traced back to the direct action of the mind on the pineal gland. This activity of
the mind “consists entirely in the fact that simply by willing something it brings it about
that the little gland to which it is closely joined moves in the manner needed to bring
about the effect corresponding to this volition.”61 Descartes never claims that such ac-
tions of the mind temporally precede movements of the pineal gland, nor is there
any reason why the soul should require any time to bring about its immediate
effect.62 Perhaps the action of the soul would need to come first if mind —> body
causation were analogous to our ordinary conception of physical impact, since in
that case the activity of the mind would involve the transfer of this motion to the
body, and motion would need to be first in the mind and then in the body. But, of
course, the mind could not have any motion since it is not extended. Rather than
physical collision, Descartes suggests that mind —> body causation is analogous
to what the scholastics have in mind when they say that the downward motion of
bodies is caused by a real quality of heaviness (pesanteur; gravitas).63 And whatever
one makes of this analogy, it is clear that the heaviness of a body, according to the
scholastic model, is not temporally prior to the downward tendency it produces.
It might be objected that the condition of causal simultaneity would imply that I
am not the cause of the motions of my limbs, and therefore not responsible for what
they do, since the motions of my limbs are subsequent to the motions of my pineal
gland.64 Perhaps this worry explains why, when pressed about the precise nature
of mind —> body causation, Descartes sometimes preferred to say that the mind,
like gravity, can be thought to act directly on the whole body or any of its parts.65
But even if Descartes sticks to the more localized, pineal model of mind —> body
59
AT 5 404; CSMK 381. He goes to say that the power may also be “some other creature to which
God gave the power to move a body” (ibid.). He is probably talking of angels since the question of
their powers had already come up frequently in the exchange with More (AT 5 270, 342, 347; CSM 1
361, 372, 375). On the power of our minds to move bodies, see also AT 8A 65; CSM 1 242.
60
AT 5 347; CSMK 375. The case for the real power of minds in Descartes’s world is made
persuasively by Garber in “Descartes and Occasionalism” in Descartes Embodied, 209–13.
61
AT 11 360; CSM 1 343.
62
Of course, the actual motion cannot be produced instantaneously since all motion takes time.
Rather what the mind produces in the pineal gland is a “tendency” to move. Descartes mentions the
distinction in le Monde : “the action of these parts—i.e. the tendency [l’inclination] they have to move—
is different from their motion” (AT 11 44; CSM 1 96). As he explains in the proof of the law of
rectilinear motion, tendency is an instantaneous state of bodies which gives rise to their actual motion
over time: “Note that I am not saying that rectilinear motion can take place in an instant, but only that
all that is required to produce it is present in each instant [en chaque instant] that may be determined
while they are moving” (AT 11 45; CSM 1 97). See also his account of the distinction in the Principles
(AT 8A 64; CSM 1 242) and the Optics (AT 6 88; CSM 1 155).
63
AT 3 667, AT 5 223, AT 7 442; CSMK 219, 358, CSM 2 298.
64
I thank Deborah Boyle for drawing my attention to this problem.
65
AT 7 442; AT CSM 2 298.
42.4gorham. 404 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

causation, this needn’t imply that I am not responsible for the voluntary move-
ments of my limbs. If I will a movement of my finger and in so doing bring about
a motion of my pineal gland which I know will end, by immutable laws grounded
in God’s continuous creation, with my finger pulling the trigger, then I am surely
to blame (or to credit, as the case may be).
So it appears that in Descartes’s world God and finite minds both produce
motion, and do so instantaneously. God acts by continuously creating the world,
with all its translations and impulses, and we act by sometimes instantaneously
producing a tendency to move in the pineal gland. And despite Hume’s fears,
time and succession are not thereby annihilated. Yet a different sort of problem
must now be faced if we hold to the doctrine that all motions in the world are the
result of continuous creation. At any instant at which I produce motion in my
pineal gland, God recreates the entire universe and all its motions, including
those of my pineal gland. If God himself transfers my arm or pineal gland from
this place to that, what does that leave for me to accomplish in voluntary move-
ment? One possible answer, which was favored by a number of Descartes’s follow-
ers, is that I have no causal role in voluntary movement since God is the only
genuine cause of motion.66 But we have already seen that the power we have to
move our own bodies is for Descartes a “primitive” notion that cannot be gain-
said.67 Therefore, one would like to have a solution to the problem that somehow
allows God and finite minds both to be causes of motion.
One approach which might allow this, and which was certainly a live option in
Descartes’s time, would be to follow the scholastics in distinguishing between dif-
ferent ways in which God and finite things contribute to the production of the
same effect. Thus, a number of recent commentators have argued that Descartes
employed some version of the doctrine of divine concurrentism.68 Concurrentism is
sometimes characterized as marking out a middle ground between occasionalism,
which attributes all causal activity to God, and mere conservationionism, which
restricts God’s role to that of maintaining finite causal agents in existence.69 While
there is an exotic variety of concurrentist doctrines in late scholastic philosophy,70
the basic idea is that God (the “primary cause”) and finite things (the “secondary
66
Such as Louis de la Forge. For discussion see Steven Nadler, “Louis de La Forge and the Devel-
opment of Occasionalism: Continuous Creation and the Activity of the Soul,” Journal of the History of
Philosophy 36 (1998): 215–31.
67
AT 3 665; CSMK 218.
68
Kenneth Clatterbaugh, “Cartesian Causality, Explanation and Divine Concurrence,” History of
Philosophy Quarterly, 12 (1995): 195–207, and The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy, 1637–1739,
(New York: Routledge, 1999), ch. 3; Helen Hattab, “The Problem of Secondary Causation in Descartes:
A Response to Des Chene,” Perspectives on Science, 8 (2000): 93–118; Andrew Pessin, “Descartes’s Nomic
Concurrentism: Finite Causation and Divine Concurrence,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 41 (2003):
25–49; Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia, 319–41; McLaughlin, “Descartes on Mind-Body Interaction
and the Conservation of Motion,” esp. 178–79.
69
See Alfred J. Freddoso, “God’s General Concurrence with Secondary Causes: Prospects and
Pitfalls,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 67 (1994): 131–56, esp. 132–34, and his book–length
introduction to MD. See also Clatterbaugh, The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy, 13.
70
Thus, Malebranche concludes his brief survey of scholastic concurrentism with the remark:
“there are so many different views on the matter that I cannot bring myself to relate them” (“Search
After Truth,” Elucidation XV, in Philosophical Selections, Steven Nadler, ed. [Indianapolis: Hackett Pub-
lishing Company, 1992], 101).
42.4gorham. 405 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

causes”) somehow conspire in the immediate production a given effect. The view
is not that God and finite things each produce distinct effects which combine for
a final result, like two independent contractors who each do their part in the
construction of a house. Rather, each cause directly produces the final result it-
self, though in different ways. As Aquinas explains: “the same effect is not attrib-
uted to a natural cause and to a divine power in such a way that it is partly done by
God and partly by the natural agent; rather it is wholly done by both, according to
a different way, just as the same effect is wholly attributed to the instrument and
wholly attributed to the principle agent.”71
In what different ways are the primary and secondary causes responsible for their
common effect? According to Aquinas, the primary cause gives being (esse) to the effect
while the secondary cause determines the effect to be a specific kind of being. Thus:
The first of all effects is being; for all others things are certain determinations of being.
Therefore, being is the proper effect of the first agent, and all other agents effect it in so
far as they act in the power of the primary agent. By contrast, secondary agents, which as it
were particularize and determine the primary agent’s action, produce as their own effects
the further perfections that serve to determine that being.72
A similar account of the respective contributions of the primary and secondary

causes is given by Suarez: “The first cause has an influence on every effect or
action whatsoever precisely because every effect or action has some share in be-
ing. The secondary cause, on the other hand, always has its influence under some
more posterior and determinate concept of being” (MD 22, 3, 10).73 So, for ex-
ample, one might say that God is the reason this puppy exists at all, whereas the
parents are the reason it happens to have been born a poodle.74 Now, Aquinas
and Suarez are two scholastic authors whose writings Descartes certainly knew
and relied upon.75 Perhaps he adapted their model of concurrence to account for
the relation between God and humans in the production of certain pineal motions.
71
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Vernon J. Bourke, trans. (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1975), 237.
72
Summa Contra Gentiles, 3, 66. See also Summa Theologica, Fathers of the Dominican Republic,
trans., in Great Books of the Western World, vols. 19 and 20 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Inc.,
1952), 535, Q. 104, a.1 and Q. 105, a.5.
73
See also the account of the distinction between universal and particular efficient causes given
by Eustachius a Sancto Paulo (whom Descartes read and admired—AT 3 232; CSMK 156), Summa
Philosophiae Quadrapartita (Paris, 1609), Part III, First Part, Treatise II (Causes), Questio iii. The ques-
tion of exactly how the primary cause acts with the secondary cause was hotly disputed on a number of
points. As Stephen Menn observes: “the late scholastic authors were quite uneasy, and badly split,
about how to describe God’s relationship to secondary causes” ( “On Dennis Des Chene’s Physiologia,”
Perspectives On Science 8 [2000]: 119–43, see 133–34). For example, whereas Thomists tended to hold
that God contributes some “principle of action” to the secondary cause, Suarez argues that God sim-
ply acts with the secondary cause to produce the effect. See MD, 22, 2. For discussion, see Freddoso,
Introduction to MD, cvii–cxv, and Des Chene, Physiologia, 321.
74
For recent discussion of this notion of concurrence, see Freddoso, “God’s General Concur-
rence with Secondary Causes: Prospects and Pitfalls,” 147–48; Freddoso, Introduction to MD, xcvi–
cvii; Des Chene, Physiologia, esp. 321–22; Hattab, “The Problem of Secondary Causation in Descartes:
A Response to Des Chene,” 105; Menn, “On Dennis Des Chene’s Physiologia”, 127, n.7; and Pessin,
“Descartes’s Nomic Concurrentism: Finite Causation and Divine Concurrence.”
75
In a letter to Mersenne (January 29, 1640) Descartes remarks: “I am not so deprived of books
as you may think; I have with me a copy of St. Thomas’s Summa and a Bible which I brought from
France” (AT 3 630; CSMK 142). Suarez is one of the few authors (scholastic or otherwise) whose
writings Descartes cites in print (AT 7 235; CSM 2 164).
42.4gorham. 406 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

In deciding this matter, one point deserves to be emphasized at the outset.
Whereas it is essential to the concurrentist model that primary and secondary
causes bring about their given effect in different ways, with the secondary cause
somehow subordinated to the primary, Descartes himself apparently recognized
no distinction between the means by which God and humans move bodies. Thus
he confesses to More: “the only idea I can find in my mind to represent the way in
which God or an angel can move matter is the one which shows me the way in
which I am conscious I can move my body by my own thought.”76
Although Descartes does speak quite frequently of God’s “concurrence”
(concursis; concours) in the ordinary course of events, he usually means simply con-
tinuous creation/conservation, rather than a sophisticated causal collaboration
between God and finite things. Consider a well known passage from the Principles
of Philosophy (Part 2, Sec. 36), which is often cited in support of the concurrentist
interpretation. Descartes says that God first created all the matter in the universe,
along with its motion and rest, “and now merely by his regular concurrence
[conucursum ordinarium] God conserves [conservat] the same amount of motion
and rest in the universe”.77 Though this remark seems to identify the act of divine
concurrence with the act of conservation, it leaves open the possibility that con-
currence is a different, perhaps weaker, process than creation. Yet in the same
section Descartes says explicitly says that conservation is the same as creation:
Thus, God imparted various motions to the parts of matter when he created them, and he
now conserves [conservet] all this matter in the same way and by the same process [eodem
plane modo eademque ratione] as when he originally created it [creavit]; and it follows from
what we have said that this fact alone makes it reasonable to think that God likewise always
conserves the same quantity of motion in the same manner.78
So, for Descartes, to concur is just to conserve, and to conserve is just to continue
to create.
Concurrence and continuous creation seem to be equated also in Part Five of
the Discourse, where Descartes explains how a material universe with a structure
like ours could have emerged out of a primordial “chaos.” He asks us to imagine
that God created the material chaos “and then did nothing but lend his regular
concurrence [concours ordinaire] to nature, leaving it to act according to the laws
he established.”79 It might be thought that in merely concurring with nature, God
does something less than he did at the beginning. But Descartes himself is anx-
ious to block this inference, which he fears might insinuate deism and detract
from the “miracle of creation”:
But it is certain, and it is an opinion commonly accepted among theologians, that the act
by which God conserves [conserve] the world is just the same as that by which he created it
[l’a creé]. So even if in the beginning God had given the world only the form of a chaos,
provided that he established the laws of nature and then lent his concurrence [son concours]
to enable nature to act as it normally does, we may believe without impugning the miracle
76
AT 5 347; CSMK 375; See also AT 5 403–4; CSMK 381.
77
AT 8A 61; CSM 1 240. My emphasis.
78
AT 8A 62; CSM 1 240. My emphasis.
79
AT 6 42; CSM 1 132.
42.4gorham. 407 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

of creation [miracle de la creation] that by this means alone all purely material things could
in the course of time have come to be just as we now see them.80
The “opinion commonly accepted among the theologians” is invoked in order to

forestall the suspicion that in the proposed cosmogony God’s concurrence with
nature amounts to nothing more than passively allowing the world to evolve into
its current form. Descartes’s point is that even if God now does “nothing but”
concur with nature, he nevertheless continues to do precisely what he did at the
beginning: create the world out of nothing. Once again, concurrence reduces to
continuous creation.81
There is additional evidence that Descartes had no special notion of concur-
rence distinct from creation/conservation. In the Principles, he defines a created
substance as what needs only “God’s concurrence” (concursus Dei) in order to
exist.82 Here concurrence is simply the familiar two-termed relation whereby God
maintains finite substances in existence. Similarly, in the Synopsis of the Meditations,
requiring concurrence seems to be the same as needing to be created: “absolutely
all substances, or things which must be created by God in order to exist, are by
their nature incorruptible and cannot cease to exist unless they are reduced to
nothingness by God’s denying his concurrence [Deo concursum] to them.”83 And
in a long and detailed letter to Gassendi’s follower Hyperaspites, Descartes offers
the same definition of substance as in the Synopsis (i.e. what requires only the
concurrence of God) immediately after using the term ‘concurrence’ in a de-
fense of continuous creation: “There is no doubt that if God withdrew his concur-
rence [concursu], everything which he has created would immediately go to noth-
ing; because all these were nothing until God created them and lent them his
concurrence.”84 Finally, in a letter to Mersenne he says that he had affirmed “God’s
immediate concurrence [concourt immediatement] in all things” in his First Re-
plies85—but the doctrine defended in those replies is simply continuous creation.86
80
AT 6 45; CSM 1 133–34. The “commonly accepted” theological doctrine that God’s action is
“just the same” in creation as in conservation is repeated in the Principles: “God imparted various
motions to the parts of matter when he first created them, and now he preserves all this matter in the
same way and by the same process by which he originally created it [eodem plane modo eademque ratione
qua prius creavit]” (AT 8A 62; CSM 1 240). So it does not seem possible that when Descartes speaks of
God’s concurrence he means it in the following weak sense used by Suarez: “the initial effecting is
brought about by a single cause, whereas many causes concur with respect to the conservation” (MD
21, 2, 3). For this would seem to imply that creation and conservation are different sorts of acts, one
solitary and other collaborative.
81
One might hold that Descartes may not intend in this passage to equate concurrence and
continuous creation/conservation even though he says God does both and yet “does nothing but lend
his general concurrence to nature” after the original creation. See, for example, J. A. van Ruler, The
Crisis of Causality: Voetius and Descartes on God, Nature and Change (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 273. But if
this causal involvement in the activities of created things amounts to more than a mere permission to
exist and operate, which it must on the concurrentist model, then it is unclear why Descartes should
feel the need to invoke the doctrine of continuous creation in order to quell any suspicion of deism.
82
AT 8A 25; CSM 1 210.
83
AT 7 14; CSM 2 10. See also AT 7 434–35; CSM 2 293.
84
AT 3 429; CSMK 193.
85
AT 3 360; CSMK 180.
86
AT 7 109; CSM 2 80. The letters to Hyperaspites and Mersenne are also cited by van Ruler as
evidence “that Descartes does not distinguish between a divine concursis or concours and God’s continu-
ous conservation” (Van Ruler, The Crisis of Causality: Voetius and Descartes on God, Nature and Change, 273).
42.4gorham. 408 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

Despite his frequent use of ‘concurrence’ to refer to continuous creation, there
are passages in which Descartes seems to embrace the concurrentist notion that the
same thing can have two different kinds of causes. For example, in the Fifth Replies
he says that subsequent to the action of the “original cause” (causae primae) we need
to distinguish between “causes of being” (causas secundum esse) and “causes of coming
into being” (causas secumdum fieri). A father, for example, is the cause of his child in
the latter sense only since the child can live on independently of the father.87 Simi-
larly, in the Principles Descartes distinguishes between the universal and primary
cause (“the general cause of all the motions in the world”) and the secondary and
particular cause (“which produces in some individual piece of matter some motion
which it previously lacked”).88 These two distinctions are clearly reminiscent of the
version of scholastic concurrentism according to which the primary cause is the
reason the effect is something rather than nothing and the secondary cause is the
reason it has a specific nature. In the Principles, he even says that the universal cause
is God’s “ordinary concurrence” (conucursum ordinarium) with the created world.
Perhaps Descartes applies this model to account for the relation between continu-
ous creation and human action: God is the cause of the being (the universal cause)
of all the motion in the world while humans are the causes of the coming into
being (the particular causes) of the various motions of our pineal gland. In this
sense, God and humans could be said to concur in voluntary bodily movements.
But this account faces a number of difficulties. For one, Descartes seems to
regard God himself as both the cause of the being and the cause of the coming to
be of things, and also as both the universal and the particular cause of motion.
Thus, in the Fifth Replies he says: “The sun is the cause of the light which it emits,
and God is the cause of created things, not just in the sense that they are the cause
secundum fieri of those things, but also in the sense that they are their causes secun-
dum esse. ”89 Indeed, although Descartes seems to have taken this distinction nearly
word for word from the Summa Theologica, he shears from it all Aristotelian trappings.90
According to Aquinas the cause of esse is the cause of the ‘form-as-such’ of the effect,
which rules out humans as causes secundum esse of even their own offspring. At most,
a human can “be the cause that this matter receives this form; and this is to be the
cause of becoming, as when man begets man.”91 But Descartes conceives of the
distinction not in this way, but simply in terms of the time of the efficient cause’s
operation. As both causa secumdum fieri and causa secundum esse of all created things,
God is engaged in the same causal operation at different times and “must always
continue to act on the effect in the same way in order to keep it in existence.”92 So
God is both cause of being and cause of coming to be not because he alone is the
87
AT 7 369; CSM 2 254–55.
88
AT 8A 61; CSM 1 240.
89
AT 7 369; CSM 2 254–55. In the Conversations with Burman, Descartes is reported as saying that
God is the “total cause and the cause of being itself [causa totali ipsius esse]” and also that such a cause
“brings something into being, i.e. out of nothing [producatque aliquid secundum esse, id est ex nihilo]” (AT
5 156; CSMK 340).
90
Summa Theolgica, 535. Q. 104 a.1. Descartes even uses the same examples as Thomas: the
builder of the house, the sun and its light, the parent of the child. For further discussion of differences
between the notion of creation/conservation in Aquinas vs. Descartes, see Garber, “How God Causes
Motion,” in Descartes Embodied, 195–98, and Gilson, Descartes’s Discours de la Méthode, 341.
91
Summa Theolgica 535, Q, 104, a.1.
92
AT 7 369; CSM 2 255.
42.4gorham. 409 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

source of the “forms” of things, but rather because he must be called on not only to
bring a thing into existence but also to keep it in existence. Thus, Descartes de-
rives his conclusion that God is both sorts of cause from his own familiar “parts of
time” argument for continuous creation: “This can be plainly demonstrated from
my explanation of the independence of the divisions of time.”93 So, in Descartes’s
hands, the scholastic distinction between cause of becoming and cause of being
reduces to his (merely conceptual) distinction between creation and conservation.
Nor does Descartes’s distinction between the universal and particular causes
indicate a collaboration between God and created things. Descartes says that the
universal and primary cause is God’s conservation of the total quantity of motion
in the world and the secondary and particular causes are the three laws of na-
ture.94 But, as Dennis Des Chene has pointed out, these causes are not related to
one another in the way concurring causes are supposed to be on the scholastic
model.95 For example, the principle of the conservation of motion and the law of
rectilinear motion do not produce the same effect in different ways, with the one
cause subordinated to the other. The latter concerns the instantaneous determi-
nation of the rectilinear “tendency” of each body in a certain direction, which
seems quite independent of the question whether the total quantity of motion in
the universe is conserved.96 Furthermore, although Descartes says in the Principles
that the laws of nature are the particular causes of motion, it turns out that these
laws are nothing but the manifestations of God’s continuous and immutable op-
eration. Thus the reason for the first and second laws is just “the immutability and
simplicity of the operation by which God preserves motion in matter.”97 Accord-
ing to the first law, if follows from God’s immutability that things persist in the
same state (including motion or rest) unless acted upon by an external cause.
According to the second law, the tendency of bodies is always to move along a
straight line since “God always preserves the motion in the precise form in which
it is occurring at the very moment he preserves it, without taking account of the
motion which was occurring a little while earlier.”98 Finally, the reason for the
second part of the third law, which is that in a collision the stronger body loses a
quantity of motion equal to that which it imparts to the weaker body, is that “God
preserves the world by the self-same action and in accordance with the self-same
laws as when he created it.”99 So if there are any causes with which God concurs,
they are not other agents, but simply his own operations.100
93
Ibid.
94
AT 8A 61–62; CSM 1 240–41.
95
Des Chene, “On Laws and Ends: A Response to Hattab and Menn,” Perspectives on Science 8
(2000), 144–63, see 153. See also Garber, Descartes’s Metaphysical Physics, 202.
96
AT 8A 63–64; CSM 1 241–42.
97
AT 8A 63; CSM 1 242.
98
AT 8A 63–64; CSM 1 242.
99
AT 8A 66; CSM 1 243. The defense of the first part of the third law, which is that a body loses
none of its quantity of motion if it collides with a stronger body, does not mention God specifically but
says simply that: “there is no reason why its motion should be stopped or diminished” (AT 8A 65–66
CSM 1 243). For further defense of the view that Descartes’s laws of nature do not, as particular
causes, involve additional agency beyond that of God, see Hatfield, “Force (God) in Descartes’s Phys-
ics,” 123–29 and Garber, Descartes’s Metaphysical Physics, 201–2.
100
Defenders of the concurrentist interpretation give considerable weight to a passage from le
Monde in which Descartes says that there are many changes in the parts of matter that cannot be
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Perhaps the most serious problem in using the universal/particular version of
concurrentism to account for the relation between divine and human action is
that Descartes indicates in an October 6, 1645 letter to Elizabeth that such an
arrangement would deprive God of the full credit he is due:101
I must say at once that all the reasons that prove that God exists and is the first and immu-
table cause of all effects that do not depend on human free will prove similarly, I think, that
he is also the cause of all those effects which do so depend. For the only way to prove he
exists is to consider him as a supremely perfect being; and he would not be supremely
perfect if anything could happen in the world without coming entirely from him [entierement
de lui]. It is true that faith alone tells us of the grace by which God raises us to a supernatu-
properly attributed to the action of God “because that action never changes, and which therefore I
attribute to nature [je les attribue a la Nature]” (AT 11 37; CSM 1 93). Helen Hattab finds in this an
endorsement of the scholastic view that there are secondary causes in nature. But although Descartes
does say in le Monde that since God’s actions are immutable, motions are rendered irregular by the
“diverse dispositions of matter [les diverses dispositions de la matiere]” (AT 11 46; CSM 1 97), it is not
obvious that he means to attribute causal power to matter. Indeed, he suggests that the differences in
motion are accidental: “That is, with God always acting in the same way, and consequently always pro-
ducing substantially the same effect, there are as if by accident [comme par accident] many differences
in this effect” (AT 11 37; CSM 1 93). Furthermore, even if Descartes here attributes real causal power
to the dispositions of matter, this hardly supports the concurrentist interpretation. For matter would
not then be concurring with the immutable of action of God, but rather acting contrary to that action,
by introducing irregularity. (A similar point is made by Des Chene, “On Laws and Ends: A Response to
Hattab and Menn,” 151.) In any event, by the time of the Principles, Descartes no longer attributes
changes in motion to the dispositions of matter, nor appear to recognize any tension between God’s
immutability and changes in matter. On the contrary, in the justification for the second part of the
collision law, he says: “the very fact that creation is in a continual state of change is thus evidence of the
immutability of God” (AT 8A 66; CSM 1 243). A somewhat more complex, though still concurrentist,
reading of the passage from the Principles is presented by Helen Hattab. She argues that rather than
matter, the laws of nature themselves are secondary causes, which in some sense “constrain” the action
of the primary cause (Hattab, “The Problem of Secondary Causation in Descartes: A Response to Des
Chene,” 108–11). In particular, the laws of nature are distinct from the primary cause because they
presuppose the existence of matter: “the laws of nature are distinct from God’s immutability for
Descartes, since the contents of these laws depends both on God’s immutable action and the existence
of a certain kind of material world” (ibid., 116). But although Hattab is surely right to point out that,
for example, the first law has no application unless there are bodies that could, in idealized circum-
stances, “always remain in the same state” (AT 8A 62; CSM 1 241), it is not clear how this “makes the
law a secondary cause distinct in its function from the action of the first cause” (Hattab, “The Problem
of Secondary Causation in Descartes”, 113). Since God is granted to be the entire and continuous
cause of the matter, as well as of the total quantity of motion, the particular laws of motion do not seem
so much to constrain God’s action as merely describe the results of his immutable action in a certain kind
of material realm. To use an analogy, suppose there is a chef who produces a number of ingredients ex
nihilo while at the same time mixing them together by a continuous and immutable stirring operation.
The ingredients will blend together in some particular fashion, depending on the nature of the blend-
ing action and the “dispositions” of the ingredients. So there will exist a model or description of this
mixing process, which will presumably be regular or “law-like” if the operation is immutable and the
quantities of motion and ingredients are conserved. But this model or description does not seem to
constitute an additional causal agent with a “distinct function” from the chef.
101
This problem is also raised by Clatterbaugh, “Cartesian Causality, Explanation and Divine
Concurrence,” 202. There is another context in which Descartes has the opportunity to affirm a
concurrentist interpretation of his system, but he does not do so. In correspondence with Descartes,
Arnauld suggests that if I am the author of my own thoughts then it seems I might be able to conserve
myself since thought is the essence of the mind. Arnauld continues: “Still I see what response is pos-
sible to this: namely, that it is from God that we think, and from ourselves, yet with God’s concurrence
[Deo tamen concurrente], that we think this or that” (AT 5 214). In his response, Descartes does not
mention concurrence but simply insists that the mind is the efficient cause of its own thoughts (AT 5
221; CSMK 357).
42.4gorham. 411 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

ral beatitude. But Philosophy by itself is able to discover that the slightest thought could
not enter into a person’s mind without God willing from all eternity that it should so enter.
The Scholastic distinction between universal and particular causes [les causes universelles et
particulieres] is out of place here. The sun, although the universal cause of all flowers, is not
the cause of the differences between tulips and roses; but that is because their production
depends on some other particular causes not subordinated to the sun. But God is the
universal cause of everything in such a way as to be also the total cause [cause totale] of
everything; and so nothing can happen without his will.”102
According to Descartes’s way of thinking, if God relied on particular causes not

properly subordinated to him in order to determine the specific differences among
things then it would not be true that the resulting effects came entierement de lui.103
So the immensity of God’s power implies that he is the total cause of everything in
the sense of being the cause of all the particular differences among events, in-
cluding even those things which depend (also) on human free will.104 God does
not leave it to other causes to produce our diverse volitions and bodily move-
102
AT 4 314; CSMK 272.
103
In his vigorous defense of the concurrentist reading, Andrew Pessin argues that this passage
can be interpreted as ruling out only “non-subordinate” secondary causes of human actions: “Descartes
claims that God is the universal and total cause in opposition to the flowers case where there are other
causes not subordinated to the universal cause. This suggests not that Descartes is denying creatures’s
causal contributions, but merely that he is affirming that secondary causes are subordinated to God or
God’s causal activity” (Pessin, “Descartes’s Nomic Concurrentism: Finite Causation and Divine Con-
currence,” 43). But if Descartes were merely insisting in this letter that the actions of finite minds are
subordinate to God, in the concurrentist sense, he would not say that the scholastic distinction be-
tween universal and particular causes itself is “out of place here [n’a point ici de lieu]” (AT 4 314; CSMK
272). For our minds could certainly be the particular causes of the differences among our thoughts,
with God as their universal cause, while still being subordinate to God. That is the scholastic picture,
after all, and Descartes certainly understood it. Rather, the reason he thinks the picture is out of place
is because it does not subordinate particular causes to the extent that is required in order for it to be
true that all human actions come “entirely” from God. What Descartes insists upon in opposition to
the sun/flowers model is that God himself is directly responsible for all of the particular differences
among our thoughts, so that “not even the slightest thought could enter our head without God willing
from all eternity that it should so enter” (ibid.). The distinction is out of place because God is both the
universal and the particular cause of everything that happens: Descartes’s “totalitarian God” demands
not merely subordination but complete and direct authority. Along with Pessin, Vere Chappell also
suggests that the letter to Elizabeth can be read in concurrentist terms, though he does not elaborate
on the precise nature of the concurrence he has in mind (Vere Chappell, “Descartes’s Compatiblism,”
in Reason, Will and Sensation: Studies in Descartes’s Metaphysics, John Cottingham, ed. [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994], 184).
104
I do not mean to suggest that total cause (causa totalis) is a technical term in Descartes’s
writings. In scholastic philosophy, a total cause is a cause which, unlike a partial cause does not need
an additional cause of the same species. But there is no reason an effect could not have two total
concurring causes since in that case one cause would be subordinated to the other. For example,
Suarez says that it is not contradictory for the same action to proceed from two total causes, so long as
they are “essentially ordered” to one another as concurrent causes rather than parts of a single cause
(Francisco Suarez, On Efficient Causality: Metaphysical Disputations 17, 18, and 19. Alfred J. Freddoso,
trans. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994], 18, 1, 9). Sometimes, this is how Descartes seems to
use the notion of cause totale. (AT 3 274, CSMK 166) Elsewhere in Descartes, total causes are the
causes of the being of the effect (AT 5 156; CSMK 340). But in the October 1645 letter to Elizabeth he
seems to imply that total causes produce their effects all on their own: God would not be completely
perfect “s’il pouvait arriver quelques choses dans le monde quie ne vient pas entierement de lui” (AT 4 314;
CSMK 272). For further discussion of the notion of total cause in Descartes, see Pessin “Descartes’s
Nomic Concurrentism: Finite Causation and Divine Concurrence, ” 42–44. (In this note and the
previous one I have benefited from the generous comments of a referee.)
42.4gorham. 412 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

ments, nor rely on them for assistance. Rather he brings about all of the particular
volitions and movements directly and all by himself. As he explains to Elizabeth God
is not only the universal, but also the particular cause of all things: “the better known
this infinity [of God’s power] to us, the more certain we are that it extends even to
the most particular of human actions [les plus particulieres actions des hommes].”105
We can now see that where the occasionalist answer to the puzzle about the
relation between continuous creation and human action takes too much away
from finite minds, the concurrentist solution takes too much away from God.106
105
AT 4 315; CSMK 273. See also le Monde: “The theologians teach us that God is also the author of
all our actions in so far as they exist and in so far as they have some goodness” (AT 11 46–47; CSM 1 97);
Principles 1, 24: “God alone is the true cause of everything that is or can be” (AT 8A 14; CSM 1 201);
Principles 1, 28: “We should instead consider him as the efficient cause of all things” (AT 8A 16; CSM
1 202). In Principles 1, 23 he says that God simultaneously understands, wills, and accomplishes every-
thing except the evil of sin. And evil is exempted only because it is not a real thing (AT 8A 14; CSM 1
201). See also the Third Replies: “And such immense power is contained in this idea that we understand
that, if God exists, it is a contradiction that anything else should exist which was not created by him” (AT
7 188; CSM 2 132); the Sixth Replies: “If anyone considers the immeasurable greatness of God he will find
it manifestly clear that there can be nothing whatsoever that does not depend on him. This applies not
just to everything that subsists, but to all order, every law, and every reason for anything’s being true or
good” (AT 7 435; CSM 2 294); and Passions of the Soul: “We should reflect upon the fact that nothing
can happen other than Providence has determined from all eternity” (AT 11 438; CSM 1 380).
106
In dealing with the problem of making room for voluntary human movement in a world
continuously created by God, some commentators have appealed to a distinction between a substantial
cause (a cause of substance) and a modal cause (a cause of the modes of substances). See Garber, “How
God Causes Motion: Descartes, Divine Sustenance and Occasionalism, ” in Descartes Embodied, 199–
201; Nadler, “Louis de La Forge and the Development of Occasionalism: Continuous Creation and
the Activity of the Soul,” 227–30; Andrew Pessin applies the distinction to Malebranche in “Does
Continuous Creation Entail Occasionalism? Malebranche (and Descartes),” Canadian Journal of Phi-
losophy, 30 (2000), 413–39, see 429–30. In terms of this distinction, one might say that in voluntary
movements we are the modal cause of the motions in our pineal gland while God is the substantial
cause of the gland itself. In support of the distinction, the following axiom is cited from the Second
Replies: “It is a greater thing to create or preserve a substance than to create or preserve the attributes
or properties of that substance” (AT 7 166; CSM 2 117). The main difficulty with this approach is that
it is hard to understand how, in the framework of Cartesian metaphysics, God could create a material
substance without ipso facto giving it a certain motion or rest. Descartes says there is a modal (as op-
posed to a real) distinction between substances and modes since “we can clearly perceive of a sub-
stance apart from a mode” but not vice-versa (AT 8A 29; CSM 1 214). By this he means that a body can
take on different modes—“for example, at one moment it may be greater in length and smaller in
breadth and depth, and a little later, by contrast it may be greater in depth and smaller in length” (AT
8 A 31; CSM 1 215)—not that a body could be conceived apart from any modes of extension. Thus,
the distinction between bodies and extension is merely “conceptual,” so that it is “unintelligible” to
conceive of a material substance without it being extended some way or other (AT 8A 30–31; CSM 1
214–15). As Garber mentions, this sort of problem with the axiom was explicitly raised by the inter-
viewer Burman: “Surely the attributes are the same as the substance; so it cannot be a greater thing to
create the substance” (AT 5 154; CB 15). In response, Descartes is reported to have offered the follow-
ing clarification: “It is true that the attributes are the same as the substance, but this is when they are
all taken together, not when they are taken individually, one by one. So it is a greater thing to produce
a substance than its attributes, if by producing all the attributes you mean producing each one indi-
vidually, one after the other [vel nunc unum, nunc aliud, et sic omnia]” (AT 5 155; CB 15). This suggests
that the distinction mentioned in the axiom is not between producing a substance as opposed to
producing its actual attributes, but between producing all the attributes of a substance at once as
opposed to producing them successively. But the latter distinction will not support the notion that
God and I share duties in the production of voluntary movements of my pineal gland. For certainly
when God continuously creates the substance of the world, he creates it all at once and not piecemeal.
For additional objections to the “shared-duty” model, see Clatterbaugh, “Cartesian Causality, Explana-
tion and Divine Concurrence,” 197–98.
42.4gorham. 413 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

This suggests a much simpler way of conceiving how God and finite minds both
act in the world, which has not been sufficiently explored in the secondary litera-
ture. When Descartes tell Elizabeth that God is the “total cause” of everything, he
seems to mean that God’s will alone is both necessary and sufficient for every
event: “nothing can happen without his will” and everything comes “entirely from
him.” There is a straightforward sense in which this can be true even if my will is
also sometimes a genuine cause of motion. Just as two simultaneously sounding
alarms can both be causally responsible for waking me, or the several members of
a firing squad can each be causally responsible for the death of a prisoner, per-
haps God’s will and my own sometimes causally overdetermine certain motions in
my pineal gland. On those occasions, God directly creates the entire universe, so
that his will is a fortiori sufficient for the motion of my pineal gland. So he in no
way depends on me or any other ancillary causes. At the very same instant he also
creates in me a volition that is itself sufficient for the motion in my pineal gland.107
On this model, it is not that each of us contributes some part of the resulting
quantity of motion in the gland, like a pair of workers heaving a sandbag onto a
truck. Rather, each of our wills is itself enough to set the gland moving the way it
does in voluntary movement. And it is only the initial tendency to movement of
the gland that is overdetermined, since the laws of nature (i.e. God) take over
from that point on. So a better analogy would be two agents who simultaneously
(and telekinetically) activate independent switches set to release a ball down an
inclined plane, where one of the agents also happens to produce the will to acti-
vate the switch in the other. In this way, as Descartes says to Elizabeth, God is the
source of every event that depends on human will and every event that does not.
This solution is consistent with Descartes’s assumption that God and finite minds
produce motion in the same way and does not burden him with an abstruse meta-
physics of secondary causality.108
Before turning to two important implications of the overdeterminist model
for Cartesian metaphysics, let me consider an objection. By definition,
overdetermining causes are superfluous. But then the model has no application
in the present context since God’s action could not be superfluous.109 On the
contrary, Descartes says “nothing could happen without his will.” In response, it
must be conceded that on the overdeterminist model it is not necessary for God
107
Overdetermination is a ongoing problem in the philosophy of causality. The issue in these
discussions is not so much whether there can be genuine causal overdetermination, as whether
overdetermination can be accounted for by theories of causation which hold that causes are in some
sense necessary for their effects. For discussion, see J. L. Mackie, The Cement of the Universe, (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979), 43–47 and David Lewis, “Causation” in his Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 207–12. There is also considerable discussion of
overdetermination in contemporary philosophy of mind, where the question is whether some states
are overdetermined by mental and physical causes. See, for example, Stephen Yablo, “Mental Causa-
tion,” Philosophical Studies 101 (1992): 245–80.
108
Andrew Pessin remarks in passing that (unlike Malebranche) Descartes “may well reject” the
assumption that there is no causal overdetermination of divine and human actions (“Does Continu-
ous Creation Entail Occasionalism? Malebranche (and Descartes),” 433). Nevertheless, Pessin de-
fends a concurrentist reading of Descartes in detail in Pessin, “Descartes’s Nomic Concurrentism:
Finite Causation and Divine Concurrence.”
109
Clatterbaugh, “Cartesian Causality, Explanation and Divine Concurrence,” 201.
42.4gorham. 414 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

to will whatever motions of my pineal gland I manage to bring about by my own
volition. But this does not prevent it from being true, in a slightly different sense,
that nothing can happen without God’s will. For even if this motion derived only
from my will, it would still be necessary, at that instant, for God to create me and
my pineal gland. My will can hardly exist without me, and I can hardly produce
motion in my pineal gland unless there is a body to act upon. Nor does the fact
that I need to be created at this instant prevent me from being a genuine, if
overdetermined, cause of motion, any more than my having had to be created
many years ago would prevent me from now being the sufficient cause of these
words.
The overdeterminist models seems to capture the relation among God, finite
minds, and their respective actions, that Descartes has in mind in a November 3,
1645 letter to Elizabeth. He says first that “it involves a contradiction to suppose
that God has created human beings of such a nature that the actions of their will
do not depend on his.”110 Thus, particular human actions depend on both hu-
man and the divine will, as on the overdeterminist account. Descartes goes on to
say that the independence we experience when we act, and which constitutes our
freedom, is compatible with our being in a different sense dependent on God:
“The independence which we experience and feel within ourselves and which
suffices to make our actions praiseworthy or blameworthy, is not incompatible
with a dependence of quite another kind whereby all things are subject to God.”111
So we, like everything else, are dependent on God by virtue of continuous cre-
ation, even though we have a kind of independence when we act freely to bring
about effects for which we become responsible. This is precisely how the
overdeterminist model conceives of the arrangement.
The structure of this model, according to which my being the cause of certain
bodily motions does not prevent God from being totally and continuously respon-
sible for everything that happens, has an interesting analogue in another part of
Cartesian metaphysics. In the Principles, Descartes distinguishes between finite
substances and modes in the following way: “In the case of created things, some
are of such a nature that they cannot exist without other things, while some need
only the ordinary concurrence of God in order to exist. We make this distinction
by calling the latter ‘substances’ and the former ‘qualities’ or ‘attributes’ of those
substances.”112 It is clear in this case that the real dependence of modes on cre-
110
AT 4 332; CSMK 277.
111
Ibid.
112
AT 9B 47; CSM 1 210. Flage and Bonnen suggest that the doctrine of continuous creation
actually threatens to collapse the distinction between finite substances and modes: “If both a finite
substance and the modes that clothe it depend entirely on a God that recreates them every moment,
then neither is more independent than the other” (Flage and Bonnen, “Descartes on Causation,”
871, n.115). See also Bonnen and Flage, “Descartes: the Matter of Time,” 4. But surely although all
modes and substances fully depend at any given time on the continuous causal power of God, the
difference between them can still be made out counterfactually: a substance (such as my pineal gland)
is less dependent than a mode (such as its particular motion), despite continuous creation, since the
gland could be (and later will be) be created without this particular motion, but the converse is impos-
sible. Descartes himself makes this point about the compatibility of continuous creation and the sub-
stance/mode distinction in a letter to Hyperaspites: “There is no doubt that if God withdrew his
concurrence, everything he has created would immediately go to nothing; because all things were
42.4gorham. 415 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

ated substances does not imply that those modes are independent of God, or that
God is not necessary for them, since the substances themselves depend on God.
Similarly, although I am the sufficient (if overdetermined) cause of motions in
my pineal gland, that motion could not be produced by me unless God were
creating me. The motions I produce inherit a dependence on God from me, just
as modes inherit a dependence on God from their substances. And in this way,
God is the total and primary cause of everything, but not the only cause.113
5. I M P L I C AT I O N S O F O V E R D E T E R M I N AT I O N :
H U M A N F R E E D O M A N D T H E C O N S E RVAT I O N O F M O T I O N.
An important virtue of the overdeterminist model is that it allows us to make

some progress on certain longstanding problems in Cartesian metaphysics. First,
it explains how Descartes can reconcile human freedom with his radical doctrine
of continuous creation. Consider again the October, 1645 letter in which Descartes
assures Elizabeth that Philosophy alone reveals that God is the total cause of all
effects, including those that depend on human free will.114 He re-affirms this po-
sition in the next letter: “when we think of the infinite power of God, we cannot
help believing that all things depend on him, and hence that our free will is not
exempt from this dependence.”115 It might seem obvious that Descartes is here
assuming that free will is compatible with determinism, since he implies that our
free actions are determined by God. Indeed, there are many well-known passages
in which Descartes implies that in order for an action to be free it is enough that
it is voluntary or spontaneous, i.e. that it depends on the will and is not coerced.
Thus, Axiom VII of the geometrical exposition of the Meditations states: “The will
of a thinking thing is drawn voluntarily and freely (for that is the essence of the
will) but nevertheless inevitably towards a clearly known good.”116 If we conceive
of freedom in this way, Descartes argues, there is no problem reconciling free-
dom and divine pre-ordination:
nothing until God created them and lent them his concurrence. This does not mean that they should
not be called substances, because when we call a created substance self-subsistent, we do not rule out
divine concurrence which it needs in order to subsist. We mean only that is the kind of thing that can
exist without any other created thing; and this is something that cannot be said about the modes of
things, like shape and number” (AT 3 429; CSMK 193–94).
113
The question whether one effect could have two or more “complete” or “total” causes was
much debated in late scholastic philosophy. Thus, Suarez devotes several pages to the arguments on
each side (Francisco Suarez, Disputationes Metaphysicae, Disp. 26, sect. 4). Suarez basically sides with
the opinion of Aquinas that “it is impossible for two complete causes to be the causes immediately of
one and the same thing” (Summa Theologica, 280, Part I, Q. 53, a.3). But it is quite unlikely that Aquinas’s
brief defense of this conclusion would have impressed Descartes: “there is one proximate form of one
thing; and there is one proximate mover” (Ibid.). The same goes for many of the reasons given by
Suarez, who argues, for example, that if two causes were total causes of one effect then neither of them
would be necessary “and nature abhors superfluity [natura abhorret supefluitatem]” (Disputationes
Metaphysicae, Disp. 26, sect. 4, 20). It should be noted that Suarez does not reject the possibility of an
effect having two total (in the sense of non-partial) causes when the causes “belong to different or-
ders” as do formal and material causes. See Suarez On Efficient Causality, 18, 1, 9. See also n.104 above.
114
AT 4 314; CSMK 272.
115
AT 4 332; CSMK 277.
116
AT 7 166; CSM 2 117. Similarly, in the Principles he says that “it is the special perfection of man
that he acts voluntarily, that is, freely [quod agat per voluntantum, hoc est libere]; this makes him in a
special way the author of his actions and deserving of praise for what he does” (AT 8A 18; CSM 1 205).
42.4gorham. 416 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

There may indeed be many people who, when they consider the fact that God pre-ordains
all things, cannot grasp how this is consistent with our freedom. But if we simply consider
ourselves, we realize in the light of our own experience that voluntariness and freedom are
one in the same thing [idem esse voluntarium & liberum].117
So the fact that my thoughts and volitions are all pre-determined does not pre-
vent my actions from being voluntary, and hence free. On the contrary: “the more
I incline in one direction—either because I clearly understand that reasons of
truth and goodness point that way, or because of a divinely produced disposition of my
inmost thoughts—the freer is my choice.”118
The problem is that Descartes’s version of continuous creation is a very radical
one, as we have seen. He holds not just that our thoughts and volitions have causes
distinct from themselves, but that all particular human volitions as well as their
effects “come entirely from God.” Thus, when I decide to walk across the room,
God is entirely responsible for the decision and the subsequent movement of my
body. But how can this process be voluntary, in the required sense of coming from
my own spontaneous will, if God himself produces every part of it? The question
is raised by Vere Chappell, who regards it as the most serious barrier to a
compatiblist reading of Descartes: “Even if we identify freedom with spontaneity,
eschewing indifference, we still have to understand how a volition which depends
wholly on the mind that performs it can also come entirely from God.”119 Chappell
himself fears that the only way to solve this problem with the compatiblist reading
is to dismiss Descartes’s insistence that God is the sufficient cause of all actions as
mere “rhetorical exaggeration.”120
But it seems to me that the overdeterminist view can save Cartesian compatiblism
without abandoning a literal reading of Descartes’s words. For if God and hu-
See also the 1644 letter to Mesland where Descartes says “I call free in the general sense whatever is
voluntary, whereas you wish to restrict the term to the power to determine oneself only if accompa-
nied by indifference” (AT 4 116; CSMK 234), and the Fourth Meditation: “thus the freedom and
spontaneity of my belief was all the greater in proportion to my lack of indifference” (AT 7 59; CSM 2 41).
117
AT 7 191; CSM 2 134. See also the Passions of the Soul where, after observing that “nothing can
happen other than Providence has determined from all eternity,” Descartes goes on to speak of “mat-
ters it has determined to be dependent on our free will” (AT 11 438–39; CSM 1 380).
118
AT 7 57–58; CSM 2 40. My emphasis. Similarly, in a discussion of freedom in the Sixth Replies
Descartes says “there is no problem in the fact that the merits of the saints may be said to be the cause
of their obtaining eternal life; for it is not the cause of this reward in the sense that it determines God
to will anything, but is merely the cause of an effect which God willed from eternity that it should be
the cause” (AT 7 432; CSM 2 291–92). And yet Descartes himself expresses doubt on at least one
occasion about the ability of our intellect to grasp fully the compatibility of human freedom and
divine pre-ordination ( AT 8A 20; CSM 1 206). For an interesting discussion of this passage, see Tad
Schmaltz, “Human Freedom and Divine Creation in Descartes, Malebranche and the Cartesians,”
British Journal for the History of Philosophy 2 (1994): 3–50, see 15–16.
119
Chappell, “Descartes’s Compatiblism,” 190. For further defense of the compatiblist interpre-
tation, see Paul Hoffman, “Freedom and Strength of Will: Descartes and Albritton,” Philosophical Stud-
ies 77 (1995): 241–60. For a recent critique of the compatiblist reading, see Lilli Alanen, “Descartes
on the Will and the Power to Do Otherwise,” in Henrik Lagerlund and Mikko Yrjönsuuri, eds. Emo-
tions and Rational Choice —Theories of Action from Anselm to Descartes (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
forthcoming).
120
Chappell, “Descartes’s Compatiblism,” 190. Similarly, Garber says that in the letter Descartes
is not attempting to say anything particularly original, but simply console Elizabeth with the theologi-
cal commonplace that all things “are under the ultimate control of an omniscient, omnipotent, and
benevolent God” (“Descartes and Occasionalism,” in Descartes Embodied, 205).
42.4gorham. 417 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

mans are both sufficient causes of human actions then the actions can be said to
come entirely from both. It will not be true, of course, that human actions and
their effects come only from humans. But this does not prevent them from being
voluntary or free. Consider a familiar example of overdetermination: the firing
squad. The fact that each of the bullets is sufficient for the death of the prisoner
does not imply that the killing was not a voluntary action attributable to several of
the squad.121 Nor should they be deprived of credit (or blame) for the killing.122
Likewise, a volition or motion can be spontaneous and voluntary even if God
produces the numerically identical volition or motion, for the simple reason that
they also depend on me and are not coerced.123 So, provided that Descartes is a
compatiblist, the overdeterminist model allows us to reconcile even the radical
Cartesian brand of continuous creation with human freedom.
The situation is complicated, however, by the fact that Descartes sometimes
indicates, especially in later writings, that in free actions the agent’s choice is not
merely voluntary and spontaneous, but also in some sense indifferent as to the
options available.
Whereas he had earlier held, as in Meditation Four, that “spontaneity and free-
dom of my belief was all the greater in proportion to my lack of indifference,”124
he later seems to make indifference a component of free choice, as in the Prin-
ciples: “We have such a close awareness of the freedom and indifference [libertatis
uatem & indifferentiae] which is within us that there is nothing which we can grasp
more evidently or more perfectly.”125 What does it mean for an action to be indif-
121
In discussion, Stephen Wagner has rightly pointed out that this analogy is imperfect since in
Cartesian overdetermination God causes not only the death of the prisoner, but also the will to shoot
in all the members of the firing squad. Wagner suggests that in this latter kind of scenario we would
not say that the actions are voluntary. But why not? After all, each member does exactly what he
wants—no one holds a gun to their heads—and that seems to be just what it means for an action to be
voluntary. Nor are their volitions forced, although they are caused. If it were enough for an action to
be forced that it is caused then every voluntary motion of my body would be forced since they are
caused by my volitions. Rather an action is forced if it is contrary to my will. But the executioners’
intention or will to shoot is not (or needn’t be) against their will even if someone else causes the intention.
Indeed we can hold that the intention itself is also caused by the executioner and so overdetermined.
122
Otherwise, there would be no point in the traditional practice of loading one of the rifles with
a blank, to give each member of the squad the consolation that he or she may not have been the
sufficient cause of the death. In an interesting discussion of how overdetermined crimes are handled
in the law, Hart and Honoré say that in standard cases of overdetermination of harm, such as when
two agents A and B simultaneously shoot C “all writers are agreed that both A and B are criminally and
civilly responsible for C’s death” (H. L. A. Hart and A.M. Honoré, Causation in the Law [Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1959], 216).
123
Chappell says an action is spontaneous “if it is performed by the agent entirely on his own,
without being forced or helped, or affected by any external factor, or anything other than his very self”
(“Descartes’s Compatiblism,” 180). But it seems that an action can be spontaneous (and voluntary)
even if it is not performed entirely alone, as in the firing squad example. The core notion of spontane-
ous action is simply that it is caused by an intention of the agent and is not forced. As Descartes says in
the Fourth Meditation, the will consists simply in the fact that “our inclinations are such that we do not
feel we are determined by any external force” (AT 7 57; CSM 2 40).
124
AT 7 59; CSM 2 41.
125
AT 8A 20; CSM 1 206. See also the persuasive case made by Michelle Beyssade that the 1647
French translation of the Meditations reflects a change of mind on Descartes’s part about whether
some kind of indifference is essential for freedom. Michelle Beyssade, “Descartes’s Doctrine of Free-
dom: Differences between French and Latin Editions of the Fourth Meditation,” in Reason, Will and Sensa-
tion: Studies in Descartes’s Metaphysics, John Cottingham, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
42.4gorham. 418 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

ferent? According to one conception, the action must be undetermined in such a
way that the agent had the power to do otherwise in precisely the same circum-
stances. But this sort of indifference seems to be ruled out by Cartesian continu-
ous creation. For it cannot be the case that I could have raised my arm just now, or
intended to do so, even given all the same circumstances, since among those cir-
cumstances are that God himself does not raise my arm or produce my intention
to do so. Fortunately, the sort of indifference which Descartes sometimes attributes
to the will does not seem to imply that my actions are undetermined in this strong
sense, but rather only that the choice I make arises from a “positive faculty” of
mine. Thus, in a February,1645 letter to Mesland, he continues to insist on his
Fourth Meditation position that indifference constitutes the “lowest grade of free-
dom” if by indifference one means “that state of the will when it is not impelled
one way rather than another by any perception of truth or goodness.”126 But he
agrees that we are indifferent with respect to free choices in the sense that every-
one possesses “a positive faculty [positiua facultas] to determine oneself to one or
other of two contraries.”127 It is in virtue of this faculty that we have the power to
withhold assent from even a very evident truth:
So that even when a very evident reason moves us in one direction, although morally speak-
ing we can hardly move in the contrary direction, absolutely speaking we can. For it is
always open to us to hold back from pursuing a clearly known good or from admitting a
clearly perceived truth, provided we consider it a good thing to exhibit the freedom of our will by
doing so [modo tantum cogitemus bonum libertatem arbitris nostri par hoc testari].128
I think it is important to recognize that Descartes is not here admitting that in

free choices we could have done otherwise in the same circumstances. It is true
that “absolutely speaking” we can hold back from an evident truth, but as the
crucial proviso (which I have emphasized) makes clear, this is only if some other
perception convinces us to do so. Hence if we consider all of the circumstances
which actually incline us at a given instant to a given action, there appears to be
no sense at all in which freedom requires that some other action is open to us.
This seems to be what Descartes means to suggest at the conclusion of the letter to
Mesland:
But freedom considered in the acts of the will at the moment when they are elicited does
not entail any indifference taken in either the first or the second sense; for what is undone
cannot remain undone as long as it is being done. It consists simply in ease of operation;
and at that point freedom, spontaneity and voluntariness are the same thing.129
126
AT 4 173; CSMK 245.
127
Ibid.
128
Ibid. My emphasis.
129
AT 4 174–75; CSMK 246. See also an earlier (May 2, 1644) letter to the same priest: “If we see
very clearly that a thing is good for us, it is very difficult—and in my view impossible so long as one
continues in the same thought—to stop the course of our desire” (AT 4 116; CSMK 233). He grants
that we have a power to suspend such desires, but that power can operate only when “our attention
turns from the reasons which show us that the thing is good for us” (AT 4 116; CSMK 233–34). So
what we have is not a positive power to act or judge contrary to all the reasons and desires that actually
incline, but rather a power to be inclined by different kinds of actual reasons and desires. For a de-
tailed discussion of both letters, see Anthony Kenny, “Descartes on the Will,” in The Anatomy of the Soul:
Historical Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (London: Blackwell Press, 1973).
42.4gorham. 419 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

For the purposes of the present discussion, the important thing to notice is that
the brand of indifference admitted by Descartes as an element of free actions is
perfectly consistent with the overdeterminist model. For one can admit that abso-
lutely speaking I could have raised my arm just now, even though I did not, but
only provided that I had then considered it to be a good thing to have demon-
strated my freedom in that way. And in that case, God would have himself willed
that I consider it a good thing to make such a demonstration. For as Descartes
tells Elizabeth, no such thought could have entered my mind unless God had
willed from all eternity that it should do so.130 So whether Cartesian freedom is
indifferent, or merely voluntary, the overdeterminist model allows us to achieve a
reconciliation of human freedom and continuous creation.131
130
In a manuscript found in Leibniz’s library, and apparently attributed to Descartes (Cartesius)
by Leibniz, the incompatiblist sense of being able to do otherwise is straightforwardly rejected as
inconsistent with continuous creation: “What is freedom of the mind? It is willing in such a way that we
feel there is nothing in the least which prevents us from willing the exact opposite, were we to see that
it is right to do so. Given this definition, no one can deny that we are free. Of course, if we define
freedom in such a way that something is not in my will if some power can direct my will in this way or
that, in such a way that I certainly will this or that, then freedom so defined is impossible in a creature
if we assume that an omnipotent Creator exists” (AT 11 648). However, the authenticity of this manu-
script is uncertain. For more detailed discussions of Descartes’s notion of indifference than I can offer
here, see Kenny, “Descartes on the Will” and Joseph Keim Campbell, “Descartes on Spontaneity, Indif-
ference, and Alternatives,” in New Essays on the Rationalists, Rocco Gennaro and Charles Huenemann,
ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 179–99.
131
As Tad Schmaltz has observed, Descartes further explains his notion of freedom in a January
1646 letter to Elizabeth. In response to an earlier (November, 1645) letter in which she confessed
that she found it “impossible that the will be at the same time free and attached to the decrees of God”
(AT 4 336), Descartes offers an illustration of how it can be possible that our will “is both dependent
and free.” Suppose a king has forbidden duels and yet orders two antagonistic gentlemen to travel to
a particular town with certain knowledge that they will quarrel when they meet. Descartes says the
king’s knowledge that they will fight “and even his will to determine their course of action in the way
they did [de les y determiner en cette facon]” does not prevent their fighting from being as voluntary as if
they had met independently of the king (AT 4 353–54; CSMK 282). According to Schmaltz, Descartes
is here defending the view that “God does not causally determine the actual choice, but merely knows
infallibly which choice would be made in such and such conditions, and with infinite power wills that
those conditions obtain” (Schmaltz, “Human Freedom and Divine Creation in Descartes, Malebranche
and the Cartesians,” 18). But this interpretation, which would imply a serious inconsistency between
this letter and his October, and November, 1645 letters to Elizabeth on the same topic, is by no means
forced. For after presenting the example of the king and the gentlemen, Descartes goes on to explain
how it is that although God “knew exactly what all the inclinations of our will would be since it is he
who put them in us [c’est lui-meme qui les a mises en nous]. . . he did not thereby will that we should be
constrained to the choice in question [il n’a pas volou pour cela l’y contraindre].” He says that in the story
it is possible to distinguish two types of volition on the part of the king: “one according to which the
king willed that the these gentlemen should fight, since he caused them to meet, and the other ac-
cording to which he did not so will, since he forbade duels” (AT 4 354; CSMK 282). The former
corresponds to God’s “absolute and independent will, according to which he wills all things to come
about as they do” while the latter corresponds to God’s “relative will,” which concerns the merit and
demerit of men, and “according to which he wants them to obey his laws” (ibid.). So God wills (abso-
lutely) all the inclinations of my will, and all the actions that result, but he does not will (relatively)
that I should be unable to obey his laws. So, contrary to Schmaltz, there is a sense in which God willed
and caused the fight itself, while not willing that his laws should be violated. The purpose of the
distinction obviously is to relieve God of responsibility for human sin even in the face of universal
theological determinism. While it is not clear whether this is a successful theodicy, there does not
seem to be any inconsistency in Descartes’s own mind between God’s (absolutely) determining all that
we do and his (relatively) not determining me to be unable but to follow his laws.
42.4gorham. 420 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

It is worth considering, finally, the implications of the overdeterminist model
for one other well-known problem about the relation between divine and human
action in the Cartesian world. In the Principles, Descartes holds that it follows di-
rectly from the immutability of God’s operation that “he preserves the same amount
of motion and rest in the material universe as he put there in the beginning.”132
But this conservation principle seems to be violated if finite minds are genuine
causes of motion since I presumably “add” to the total quantity of motion in the
world when I bring about a motion in my pineal gland by a simple act of the will.
The standard solution to his problem goes back at least to Leibniz, who assumed
that Descartes himself held that minds merely changed the directional determina-
tion of bodies but not their quantity of motion (size x speed).133 Yet although Descartes
certainly accepts the distinction mentioned by Leibniz, he employs it not in order
to account for the action of finite minds on the pineal gland but rather in the
proof of the first part of the collision law in Principles 2, 41.134 When he does speak
of the mind “determining” voluntary movements of the body he usually means
that the mind produces the motion.135 Indeed, as Daniel Garber has observed,
there are many passages in which he says simply that the mind brings about or
produces motion in the pineal gland.136 So perhaps Descartes thought that minds
really could add to the total quantity of motion in the universe and violate the
conservation principle. After all, he finds it to be self-evident that the mind has
the power to “set a body in motion.”137 The difficulty is reconciling this with the
claim in Principles 2, 36 that God, through the laws of nature, is both the universal
and particular cause of all motion, as well as the various passages in which Descartes
says that God is the total and efficient cause of everything.138
But if we adopt the overdeterminist model, it may be possible to accommodate
the passages in which Descartes attributes to finite minds a full-blown power to
produce motion, without having to either forsake the universal cause or violate
132
AT 8A 61; CSM 1 240. See also the corresponding principle in le Monde: “Supposing that God
placed a certain quantity of motion in all matter in general at the first instant he created it, we must
always admit that he preserves the same amount of motion in it, or not believe that he always acts in
the same way” (AT 11 43; CSM 1 96).
133
See, for example, sect. 80 of the Monadology (G, W, Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, Roger Ariew
and Daniel Garber, ed. and trans. [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989], 223). For an
interesting discussion of the history of this approach to the problem, see Tad Schmaltz “Human Free-
dom and Divine Creation in Descartes, Malebranche and the Cartesians,” 19–27. For detailed philo-
sophical analysis of the notion of ‘determinatio’ in Descartes’s physics, see Garber, Descartes’s Meta-
physical Physics, 188–93, as well as McLaughlin, “Descartes on Mind-Body Interaction and the Conser-
vation of Motion.”
134 AT 8A 65; CSM 1 242–43.
135
AT 11 225, AT 7 230; CSM 1 315, CSM 2 161. For forceful critiques of the Leibnizian reading, see
Peter Remnant, “Descartes: Body and Soul,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 9 (1979): 377–86, and Daniel
Garber, “Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature in Descartes and Leibniz,” in Descartes Embodied, 133–67.
136
For example: AT 3 665, AT 5 222, 347, 404; AT 11 132, 355, 360, 361; CSMK 218, 358, 375,
381; CSM 1 101, 341, 343, 344. See Garber, “Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature in Descartes and
Leibniz.”
137
AT 5 222; CSMK 358. This solution is defended by Garber, “Mind, Body, and the Laws of
Nature in Descartes and Leibniz.” For a recent defense of the Leibnizian reading, which is largely
directed at Garber’s article, and which includes a detailed analysis of all the relevant passages, see
McGlaughlin, “Descartes on Mind-Body Interaction and the Conservation of Motion.”
138
See the references in nn. 1, 2, and especially 105, above.
42.4gorham. 421 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

the conservation principle. For if every motion that I produce in my pineal gland
is overdetermined by God’s will, then assuming that God does not himself violate
the conservation principle when he produces the same motions, it will not be the
case that I add anything to the total quantity of motion that God conserves. Of
course, this last assumption presupposes that when God brings about the motions
in my pineal gland that are overdetermined by my own volitions, there is no net
increase in the total quantity of motion in the world, i.e. that every voluntary
movement of my pineal gland is accompanied by some loss of motion in an ad-
joining part of the brain, as in some collisions. There are certain passages which
suggest that even voluntary motions of the pineal gland presuppose bodily changes
in this way, as in the Description of the Human Body: “Even the movements which we
call voluntary occur principally as a result of the disposition of the organs, since
although it is the soul which determines the movements, they cannot be pro-
duced without the requisite disposition of the organs, no matter how much we
may will this to happen.”139 Similarly, in the Fourth Replies he says that our mind
“simply controls the animal spirits which flow from the heart via the brain into the
muscles and sets up certain motions in them.”140 These passages seem to indicate
that voluntary movements are typically accompanied by brain changes. Admit-
tedly, there are other passages, especially in the Passions of the Soul, which favor the
view that the mind sometimes introduces utterly new motion into the world, for
example: “the activity of the soul consists entirely in the fact that simply by willing
something it brings it about that the little gland to which it is closely joined moves
in the manner required to produce the effect corresponding to this volition.”141
Still, even these passages do not rule out the possibility that voluntary motion in
the gland is always compensated by a corresponding loss of motion elsewhere in
the body. And even if the conservation principle is violated in voluntary move-
ment, it does not follow that the added motion is not causally overdetermined. In
this regard, it is worth noting that in his most detailed discussions of mind-body
interaction, Descartes routinely speaks of movements which depend only on the
body,142 but when it comes to voluntary movement he says only that we experi-
ence our volitions “as seeming to depend on it [the soul] alone.”143 Thus, he ex-
plains the primary purpose of the Description of the Human Body as follows: “to
enable us to know distinctly what there is in each of our actions which depends
only on the body, and what there is which depends on the soul.”144
6. CONCLUSION
From Descartes’s own time, unsympathetic commentators have complained that

his system leaves no room for God. Pascal, for example, wrote: “I cannot forgive
Descartes. In all his philosophy he was quite willing to dispense with God.”145 On
139
AT 11 225; CSM 1 315.
140
AT 7 230; CSM 2 161.
141
AT 11 360; CSM 1 343. See also AT 11 355, 361; CSM 1 341, 344.
142
AT 11 225, 227, 329, 342, AT 7 229–30: CSM 1 315, 316, 329, 335, CSM 2 161.
143
AT 11 342; CSM 1 335. My emphasis.
144
AT 11 227; CSM 1 316. My emphasis.
145
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, W. F. Trotter, trans. (New York: The Modern Library, 1941), 29.
42.4gorham. 422 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

its face, this complaint is unfair. Although Descartes had little taste for technical
theology—including the sophisticated theories of creation promulgated in late
scholasticism—the concept of God permeates his philosophy and is indispens-
able to his project. One can hardly imagine a more religious doctrine than the
one we have just examined, that the universe is continuously saved from oblivion
by God’s creative act. Still, I think it is fair to say that Descartes always puts God in
the service of some pressing metaphysical or scientific problem, rather than vice-
versa. The doctrine of continuous creation should be understood in this light,
serving as an effective guard against the re-introduction of scholastic ideas into
modern physics. For if God literally recreates the entire universe at each instant,
preserving all the motions in all the bodies, then there is nothing left for vital
forces, substantial forms, and the like, to do.146 In this sense, Pascal is right that
Descartes needed God only “in order to set the world in motion.”147 But then the
purpose of the continuous creation doctrine was not so much to hand over all
agency to God, as to remove all agency from the physical world. At the same time,
he was quite unprepared to deprive humans of their self-evident power to move
bodies. The overdeterminist interpretation I have outlined above allows him to
have it both ways.148
146
A similar lesson is drawn by Garber, Descartes’s Metaphysical Physics, 305. For an interesting
discussion of the parallel exclusion of agency and active principles from Cartesian physiology, see
Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), especially ch. 4. See also
Geoffrey Gorham, “Mind-Body Dualism and the Harvey-Descartes Controversy,” Journal of the History of
Ideas, 55 (1994): 211–34.
147
Pensées, 29.
148
For discussion of earlier versions of this paper, I would like to thank Lilli Alanen, Deborah
Boyle, Paul Boyles, Daniel Garber, Andrew Pessin, Jorge Secada, Tad Schmaltz, Ed Slowik, Stephen
Wagner, and audiences in Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Northfield, and Collegeville. I would also
like to express my gratitude to the anonymous referees for the Journal, who offered extensive and very
helpful criticism.
42.4gorham. 423 9/10/04, 7:41 AM

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CARTESIAN CAUSATION 389

IN THE COURSE OF A PROTRACTED EXCHANGE of letters with Princess Elizabeth on the

* Geoffrey Gorham is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Eau

Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 42, no. 4 (2004) 389–423

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Secada goes on to argue that in order to derive the independence principle

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A similar account of the respective contributions of the primary and secondary

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The “opinion commonly accepted among the theologians” is invoked in order to

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According to Descartes’s way of thinking, if God relied on particular causes not

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An important virtue of the overdeterminist model is that it allows us to make

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I think it is important to recognize that Descartes is not here admitting that in

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From Descartes’s own time, unsympathetic commentators have complained that

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