IV 



DESCARTES 365 



That metaphysics hesitated at first between the two 

 paths seems to us unquestionable. The indecision 

 is visible in Cartesianism. On the one hand, Descartes 

 affirms universal mechanism : from this point of view 

 movement would be relative, 1 and, as time has just 

 as much reality as movement, it would follow that past, 

 present and future are given from all eternity. But, on 

 the other hand (and that is why the philosopher has 

 not gone to these extreme consequences), Descartes 

 believes in the free will of man. He superposes on 

 the determinism of physical phenomena the indeter- 

 minisrn of human actions, and, consequently, on time- 

 length a time in which there is invention, creation, 

 true succession. This duration he supports on a 

 God who is unceasingly renewing the creative act, 

 and who, being thus tangent to time and becoming, 

 sustains them, communicates to them necessarily some 

 thing of his absolute reality. When he places himself 

 at this second point of view, Descartes speaks of 

 movement, even spatial, as of an absolute. 2 



He therefore entered both roads one after the 

 other, having resolved to follow neither of them to 

 the end. The first would have led him to the denial 

 of free will in man and of real will in God. It was 

 the suppression of all efficient duration, the likening 

 of the universe to a thing given y which a super 

 human intelligence would embrace at once in a 



o 



moment or in eternity. In following the second, on 

 the contrary, he would have been led to all the 

 consequences which the intuition of true duration 

 implies. Creation would have appeared not simply 

 as continued^ but also as continuous. The universe, 

 regarded as a whole, would really evolve. The future 



1 Descartes, Principe*, ii. 29. 2 Ibid. ii. 36 ff. 



