XII

PREFACE.

...a quantity of notes that would initially overwhelm the space reserved for Descartes' own text. This new difficulty is resolved by dividing the notes into several categories in the following manner:

1. For the letters found without a name or date, the information required for these two points is placed at the beginning in a Prolegomenon Prolegomenon: A formal introductory essay or preliminary set of remarks..

2. A good number of details throughout each letter require clarifications: these are facts mentioned by Descartes, or perhaps responses to objections that had to be located elsewhere. The necessary information is moved to the end of the letter, each marked with the corresponding page and line numbers; the reader, while moving through the text, is alerted by an asterisk that they will find a clarification further on.

3. At the bottom of the pages, in the usual place for notes, we have been content to provide brief notes original: "notules" (the title of a cited work, the name of an author for whom we only had an initial or an imperfect designation, references to preceding or following letters, etc.). Above all, we have arranged the variants of the text in two columns whenever they exist: for several letters, indeed, we have two versions, both by Descartes: the text of the draft Minute: The preliminary draft of a letter or document kept by the sender for their own records. preserved by him and printed by Clerselier Claude Clerselier (1614–1684) was the primary editor and publisher of Descartes' posthumous works and letters., and the text of the original found in a recovered autograph Autograph: A manuscript written in the author's own handwriting.. — At the top of each page, two numbers indicate the volume and page of the Clerselier edition for the letter below: the pagination is the same for all editions of volumes II and III; for volume I, it changes from the first to the second edition: we provide the numbering for the second and third editions; a vertical bar within the text indicates the start of each page in Clerselier’s edition.

4. There remain the biographical notices regarding Descartes' correspondents and the many proper names cited in his letters. These would sometimes be quite long, which would further clutter the annotations at the bottom of the pages. Furthermore, as the same...