Every virtue and but one small defect

While everyone else was watching the debate, I was rewriting my lecture on Descartes’ “Second Meditation”. Since you can’t understand it without knowing a bit about Descartes’ physics, I always say a bit about that. My favorite discussion of the subject appears not in any secondary source, however, but in John Barth’s novel, The Sot-Weed Factor:

“Tell me, Eben: how is’t, d’you think, that the planets are moved in their courses?”

“Why, said Ebenezer, “’tis that the cosmos is filled with little particles moving in vortices, each of which centers on a star; and ‘tis the subtle push and pull of these particles in our solar vortex that slides the planets along their orbs – is’t not?”

“So saith Descartes,” Burlingame smiled. “And d’you haply recall what is the nature of light?”

“If I have’t right,” replied Ebenezer, “’tis an aspect of the vortices – of the press of inward and outward forces in ‘em. The celestial fire is sent through space from the vortices by this pressure, which imparts a transitional motion to little light globules – ”

“Which Renatus kindly hatched for that occasion,” Burlingame interrupted. “And what’s more he allows his globules both a rectilinear and a rotatary motion. If only the first occurs when the globules smite our retinae, we see white light; if both, we see color. And if this were not magical enough – mirabile dictu! – when the rotatory motion surpasseth the rectilinear, we see blue; when the reverse, we see red; and when the twain are equal, we see yellow. What fantastical drivel!”

“You mean ‘tis not the truth? I must say, Henry, it sounds reasonable to me. In sooth, there is a seed of poetry in it; it hath an elegance.”

“Aye, it hath every virtue and but one small defect, which is, that the universe doth not operate in that wise.”

I haven’t seen a transcript. So far the spin is confusing. I am seeing red and blue. Edwards won. Cheney won. Rotary surpasseth rectilinear and vice versa. I do hope Edwards got in a little something in the ‘unfortunately, the universe doesn’t work that way’ vein, domestic and foreign policy-wise.

Exercises left to the interested reader: 1) Translate the debate into proper 17th Century English. 2) Compose a rigorously Cartesian calculation of the ‘who won the debate’ wrap-up, with pundits as planets and blogs as little globules. 3) Rewrite The Sot-Weed Factor as a Robert Ludlum Novel.