The Collected Works of Descartes, Volume 1: Correspondence

I, T, V, Z These letters refer to specific categories or sections in the inventory of Descartes's papers created after his death. of the inventory would lead one to believe), they formed fairly regular series, whether they were addressed to the same correspondent or had been written in the same year. In short, two-thirds and nearly three-quarters of each volume offer an order that is easy to follow, and Clerselier seems to have been troubled only by a small number of letters that he threw together at the end of his volumes, despairing of finding for each one, not the date—which mattered little to him—but the name of the recipient. Even then, he hardly bothered with it: the essential thing for him was the very substance of each letter, or the subject it treated; the rest seemed to him only an accessory that could be removed without much loss—small pieces of news with which the letter was sprinkled, or polite phrases at the beginning and the end. "As for what

concerns," he says, "the order and the sequence of the letters in general,
as it often mattered very little which one was placed
first, each almost dealing with different questions
which do not depend on one another, I did not
dwell much upon it; but as for the arrangement and
structure original: "œconomie" — meaning the internal organization or "economy" of the argument. of each letter in particular, since it is the
work of a master, one will see the same order and the same
distribution as in all his other writings." One will

understand better how Clerselier proceeded and what services his edition can still provide by studying the three volumes one after the other.

VOLUME I.

The first volume appeared under this title: LETTERS OF Mr. DESCARTES in which are treated the finest questions of Ethics, Physics, Medicine, and Mathematics. At Paris, at the house of Charles Angot, Saint-Jacques Street, at the Sign of the City of Leiden, 1657, (publishing license original: "privilege" — a legal monopoly granted by the King to a printer for a specific work. of December 21, 1656, finished printing for the first time on January 30, 1657). A new edition of the first volume, revised and expanded, was published in 1663 (In Paris,