Read Online Descartes' Bones by Russell Shorto - Free Book Online

Science—or Cartesianism, or new philosophy—was coming to the fore at the same time this political thinking was evolving, and political and military leaders looked to it as a potential source of power. In a sense it was a trope that had played out endlessly before and would continue to do so in the future. The duke of Milan had hired Leonardo da Vinci to create military hardware; the United States would secretly smuggle Wernher von Braun and other German rocket scientists out of Germany during and after World War II, scrub them of their Nazi associations, and put them to work founding the American space program. Christina got reports on the frenzy of scientific exploration going on across the continent—people doing unheard-of things with cadavers and flower bulbs, injecting quivering animals, gazing at the heavens, predicting imminent findings that would shake society to its foundations—and she wanted to be a part of it.
    After his first, hopeful meeting with the queen, Descartes took a floor in Chanut’s house and tried to settle into life at court. He quickly found, however, that the other intellectuals she had assembled resented him. He also discovered that, where earlier Christina had been keen on his philosophy—she had read his latest book and had written to him herself, through Chanut, posing questions on the nature of love and on how the modern notion of an infinite universe could be squared with Christian belief—she now seemed to have moved on to other things.
    In particular, she had fallen heavily for Greek esoteric knowledge, a semimystical inquiry into nature that relied on ancient writers and that for a brief time rivaled the mechanistic new philosophy as a potential replacement for Aristotelianism. When Descartes discovered that the queen was giving much of her attention to the study of ancient Greek, he reacted as if it were an illness she had caught, saying to a friend, “Perhaps this will pass.” He, after all, wanted to sweep away the old learning in favor of science and experimentation and considered such study a colossal waste of time. He soon came to see Christina as a dabbler and a dilettante. And she seems to have been disappointed in him, too: he appeared more doddering curmudgeon than fiery revolutionary. His philosophy didn’t seem transferable into political power or, for that matter, personal growth.
    The mutual disillusionment played out over the course of the winter, and in circumstances unfavorable to Descartes. He liked to work at night and sleep in late; she always woke at four in the morning, and she decreed that he would give her philosophy lessons beginning at five o’clock. In the black predawn he lumbered by coach from Chanut’s house over the little hump that was the center of the island that formed Stockholm’s core and trudged up to the castle perched grandly above the harbor. It was cold, the coldest winter in living memory, his lifelong fear of catching colds and fevers reasserted itself, and he became dark. “Here men’s thoughts freeze like water,” he wrote in the last letter of his life. And added frankly, “I am out of my element.”
    And so came illness, and its worsening, and then the realization—after calling for remedies of his own concoction (for example, wine infused with tobacco to induce vomiting)—that he would not recover. Outside, far away, forces that he had helped set in motion were continuing without him. Letters came from Paris, London, Amsterdam. Pascal wanted updates on an experiment on barometric pressure for which Descartes had been giving him temperature readings. Who knew if a month or a year hence wouldn’t bring a discovery related to the regeneration of human tissue or proof that celestial bodies were governed by the same forces as those on earth, which would firmly establish his mechanical notion of the universe? Walls were collapsing, scales were falling from