Method and Melancholy: Aristotle and the defence against Cartesian estrangement

From the publication of Descartes’s Dioptrique in 1637 to the end of the century, leading English scholars declared their preference for ‘Aristotle, not des Cartes’. Modern commentators tended to interpret these declarations as defences of tradition or theologically motivated manoeuvres, yet the positions of these savants, especially concerning perception, were closer to Descartes’s than to Aristotle’s: they shunned substantial forms and their theories were materialistic and causal. We examine the works of John Sergeant (1621–1707) and his intellectual predecessors, Thomas White (1593–1676) and Kenelm Digby (1603–1665), to show that these thinkers were above all concerned with the troubling implications of Descartes’s theory of vision. If the eye is just a screen on which mere stains of light fall, vision and the senses in general, deliver to the mind ‘nothing of the thing’. This ‘estrangement’, as we call it, rather than the ontological dichotomy between body and soul, was the problem they sought to address. They turned to Aristotle to reinstate the once taken-for-granted compatibility between humans and their world.