Descartes' Bones (19 page)

The location of Descartes' home in the Dutch city of Utrecht, as it was in the 1640s.

The building in Paris that was the site of Jacques Rohault's weekly Cartesian salon in the mid-1600s. Today it houses a karaoke bar.

A meticulous eighteenth-century rendering of coffins and remains found in the old Church of St. Geneviève. It includes no indication of the coffin of Descartes.

The Church of St. Geneviève in Paris, on the right, was the second resting place of Descartes' bones, from which Alexandre Lenoir supposedly retrieved the remains during the upheaval of the Revolution. The church no longer exists.

Alexandre Lenoir, in a print showing him protecting tombs and monuments from the depredations of revolutionaries.

An eighteenth-century drawing depicting the interior of Alexandre Lenoir's Museum of French Monuments, which Napoleon said reminded him of Syria.

The decree of the revolutionary National Convention in Paris, dated October 1793, which gave Descartes, and his remains, special honors.

The portrait of Descartes now credited to Frans Hals.

The bust of Descartes created by Paul Richer in 1913, with its breakaway face.

The classic portrait of Descartes in the Louvre, which was long thought to be by Frans Hals.

Paul Richer's analysis of the skull of Descartes hit the
New York Times
on January 26, 1913.

The bust of Descartes, based on the skull, created for the 2000 Great Exhibition of the Face in Tokyo.

A
T LEAST AS MUCH
as others who would be associated with Descartes' bones—Rohault, Condorcet, Alexandre Lenoir, Delambre, Berzelius himself—Georges Cuvier personified a major aspect of modernity. Indeed, all three of the men who involved themselves with the bones at this stage made their names in association with what was the principal scientific concern of the day: classification and measurement of the overwhelming amount of data that was coming in from all quarters. Delambre brought into being what would become the global standard of measurement. Berzelius developed the modern method of representing the chemical elements and ascertained how they combine to form virtually every substance on earth. The situation in biology was particularly complex. Biologists craved the sort of base principles that Newton had developed for physics. Trying to classify life-forms begged the question of what overall purpose you had in mind. The system that was still largely in effect in the early nineteenth century was the “teleological taxonomy” created by Aristotle and refined by the Scholastic philosophers: the “scale of beings” system, which the French called the
série,
or series, and which is popularly known as the “great chain of being.” As with the medieval system of bodily humors, it was far more complex and useful than its popular stereotype suggests, but it had a serious limitation, which was its teleological basis. Teleology refers to an end or ultimate purpose and typically means a religious purpose, as in God's plan. Aristotle's orientation of knowledge was teleological, which made it easy for the Scholastics to adapt it to conform with a Christian view of creation, so that as the chain of life-forms proceeded from the simplest organisms to more complex ones it also reflected a spiritual hierarchy. In the eighteenth century this system began to lose its usefulness. By the early nineteenth century biologists and botanists had a frank case of “physics envy”—a yearning for a Newton-like figure to create underlying laws to ground their science. Cuvier argued for a completely new system that ignored teleology and instead grounded itself in observation of bodily parts and their functions. In coming up with his system, he helped invent modern zoology and comparative anatomy.