Dualism and Monism are terms that, since Descartes time, represent entirely different meanings than in the classical usage of the écoles. Today Dualism signifies the existence in an entity of a second substance, usually employed in connection with a human body and its life force or soul. Monism, arising as a denial of this second substance (the soul/ life), describes a belief in the singular substance alone; and by extension of connotation this is taken to imply the self-sufficiency of the material universe in which, after Hobbes, nothing other than corporeal matter exists, and certainly no deity.

Classically, however, dualism was the name given to logical incompatibility, attributed to Averroes and later actively worked by Siger of Brabant, that attempted to accommodate contradictory truths, i.e. What might be false in science could nevertheless be true in religion.

Monism, on the other hand, was a specialised term for Pantheism — the very ancient idea that the Prime Cause is its own effects; that, for example, created matter was a mere emanation of God.

It has occurred to me that the modern reconstruction of the term Dualism may have arisen from Descartes' founding of a metaphysics upon an esoterically supported ontology (used very early in Christendom and later contradicted by Aquinas, and his 17^th century commentator Suarez) to explain natural phenomena at the level of the primary causation which he insisted existed and was discernible through human common sense.

In other words Descartes felt it was valid to ask for such an explanation (certainly when trying to support two powerful articles of his religious Faith, his Creator God and his own Rational Soul) for the very existence of matter.

But the ontological explanation he provided has so far failed to satisfy the sensus communis, that problematic but nevertheless necessary concept without which human objectivity may not even be defined; for if two or more people cannot agree that we see or understand the same object or process as other men do, how can we be objective about either?. One indication of this failure of Descartes' "ontological proof" to impress the commonality is that it could scarcely be more universally disagreed with.

It might be argued that Cartesian Dualism begins here, in the forced accommodation of the concept of a spiritual entity within a cosmos that can, in reality, exclude it — a cosmos which, he proposed, might explain itself sufficiently in material terms alone. It is as though opposite meanings of the same term came together in the end to link arms.

It is not straining credulity to suppose how Descartes, imagining the human body as a material end in itself but being himself at the same time psychologically habituated to the notion of its being enlivened by a rational soul, mistook the seeming evidence of sensible experience for a proof (for who does not feel that in being alive, sensate, and rational, he is therefore more than mere a sum of chemical parts or mathematical essences?). Might he not have perceived common experience, therefore, to be the same as that common sense which some intellectuals accept towards a proof - despite its relying, in this case, upon the opinion of others and as such not much stronger than argumentum ad hominum?

This "dualism of substantial matter and form" as a classicist might put it, or between shape, operation and material, (especially if the operation and shape were determinable only by positing a non material or occult dynamic), would also seem to have encouraged a form of "illogical dualism" associated with Cartesianism in the domain of, say, psychology and social ethics, even to this day.

Nor is it idle to point to the weight many French Darwinists placed upon Cartesianism Mechanism (ref; the dismembering of a small live dog whose howls were explained away to startled students as being of no greater moment than the grinding of machinery gears); sometimes with tragic results as was the case in the deplorable terrorism of the nascent Third Republic — which embraced in its civic renewal both Cartesianism and Darwinism as ferociously as it propagated the doctrines of Comte etc. Nor was either name without massive influence in the early intellectualism of the Nazi Third Reich. A fact that would have quite horrified both decent men. (See Appendix A; Notes on Henri de Lubac’s The Drama of Atheist Humanism)

The well established energetics demolition of "local motion" as an explanatory dynamic (See Chapter One), also detracts from Descartes' unrivalled triumphs — as I have already indicated; by confusing them with the cosmology with which they are associated.

Once again. one wonders why Descartes' best remembered and least worthy legacy, Mechanism, has endured against such overwhelming evidence?

The sheer attractiveness of the genius and the sublimity of his empirical successes in so many important areas have obviously reflected upon his general philosophy — the pearl lending lustre to the oyster shell, as it were.

But that his mechanism continues to be advanced in school text books, even in a few universities, is quite another thing. And it is all the more surprising given the apparent inadequacy of mechanistic philosophy generally in the light of, say, Newtonian Physics, and thermodynamics — heat/energy conservation.

A less obvious answer is that in any sense, Mechanism is irrelevant as an explanatory vehicle for physics.

It was argued thus by Duhem in a thesis which has found its way into the most surprisingly diffuse authorities (Even to the point of connecting Duhem to a thinker it is impossible to imagine him further from with the so-called Duhem-Quinne Theory) "It is commonly argued now that only one criterion in physics permits us to reject as false a judgement which does not imply logical contradiction, and that is the noting of a flagrant disagreement between this judgement and the facts of the experiment.

"When a physicist affirms the truth of a proposition he affirms the fact that this proposition has been compared with the data of experiment, that among these data were some whose agreement with the proposition under examination was not a-priori necessary, but that nevertheless the deviations between these data and the proposition remained less than the experimental errors.

"By virtue of these principles we do not state that a proposition which physics can hold as erroneous when we advance the view that all the phenomena of the inorganic world may be explained mechanically for experiment cannot inform us of any phenomena not surely reducible to the laws of mechanics.

"However, neither is it legitimate to say this proposition is physically true, for the impossibility of running down a formal and unresolvable contradiction between it and the result of observation is a logical consequence of the absolute indetermination allowed by invisible masses and hidden notions.

"So it is impossible for one who holds to the procedures of experiment to declare the following proposition true: all physical phenomena are explained mechanically. But it is just as impossible to explain it false.

"This proposition transcends physical method. It is a system of mathematical propositions whose aim is to represent as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible a whole group of experimental laws.

And as Prince de Broglie, the former Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, remarked: "A method of classification of physical phenomena which keeps us from drowning in the extreme complexity of these phenomena."

Even despite the initial rush by (mainly French) enthusiasts to put forward Cartesianism as the explanatory cosmology for all physicality in the light of, the then new, atomic physics (quite early this century and not long after its first eclipse behind the novel light of Berthelot's maximum work theories in the then enveloping domain of thermodynamics), its ultimate failure had to be admitted.

At the same time the discovery of particle-sourced energies by Rutherford struck at the heart of a mechanism of mere extension and homogeneity, inert but for proposed local motion. It was as if an empirical mechanism had brought out just to annihilate Mechanism.

"To dissent from mechanistic physics in the name of common sense demanded much more than commonly attributed to it. That physical processes were so many impacts of moving bodies on one another seemed to be in full conformity with that common sense which merely demands that one may visualize what takes place. Descartes, who put so heavy a mark on French intellectuality, claimed common sense to his rationalism precisely because his physics (and it is claimed his Mathematics also) could be readily imagined. Nor was Newton’s dissent from Cartesianism a serious threat to the role of imagination. While the Principia contained no references to mechanical models, the physical interactions dealt with there were not necessarily beyond the confines of common sense taken for visualizability. At any rate, the Queries of the Opticks were teeming with graphic descriptions of a wide variety of physical processes, including gravitation. This explains in part the fact that although the great tradition of French mathematical physics, from d’Alembert through Laplace to Fresnel, represented a shift of allegiance from Descartes to Newton, it never implied a strict disavowal of mechanical models. The warnings which Rankine, Kirchoff, and Mach gave in the 1870s about the fundamental weaknesses of mechanistic assumptions were not broadly appreciated prior to the turn of the century. The science of mechanics had by then become the ideal which other sciences were supposed to emulate. T. H. Huxley, who spoke of ‘trained and organized common sense’ as being science itself, was an advocate of a strictly mechanistic biology." (Stanley L Jaki, Uneasy Genius, p260 also P. Boutroux, L’imagination et les mathematiques selon Descartes Paris, Felix Alcan 1900)

In the domain of philosophies of science, on the surface there was a misinformed trend towards towards idealism if not plain solipsism — a trend which started with the discrediting of causality on the basis of the equivocation that entities, processes, and interactions that cannot be measured cannot exist definitely.

Physics was becoming the study of purely spatial alteration in which the total energy was conserved. Energy then displaced physical reality. The line between physics and the most ancient notion of metaphysics was already blurred and the idea of physics as the localisation of phenomena in an extension devoid of matter was in place "an attack of vertigo" as one physicist put it..

In this world of intuition being pressed as explanation of phenomena it is worth noting that the ether constituting Kelvin's vortex atom was not really different from that purely spatial extension to which Descartes had reduced matter. As I insist, Cartesianism was getting everywhere.

Yet, how could it rise again having failed to resist radiation theories, or modern theoretical nuclear physics bringing black properties, the death of hard atoms, and demonstrating the incompatibility of the brilliantly intuitive but ultimately simplistic atomic models of the English schools — even to some extent eclipsing the mighty Newton and flustering Maxwell?

Mechanism today seems pedestrian beneath the soaring concepts of mathematical predictive theory, polynomials, and relativist hypotheses; conceptions that threaten to supplant — even if by blatant contradiction — neo-scholasticism as a radical form of high classical metaphysics.

Indeed, all mechanism, never mind Cartesian atomism, seems to admit its irrelevance in the face of Quantum physics. [page 372 note 206 R Dugas]

And, as for the gospel of Relativity — despite the fact that it is already foundering on the absolute reference systems proposed by theories of an expanding universe, not to mention 3°K cosmic background radiation — Einstein's brainchild (however he later deplored its inconstancy) seems far beyond the scope of Cartesianism either to interpret successfully or support or refute, no matter how its disciples struggle to reconstruct it (and struggle they do!). (p 371 NOTE 205 Bergmann]

As to the biological revelations implicit in genetics Cartesianism is not remotely considered as an explanatory device — where the new problem of dynamic biological information theory, say within DNA scrolls, [see Behe et all]has lifted physical explanations up to a plane inconceivably hypothetical just a few years ago.

Again, can such a simplified "material cause to material effect" philosophy, embracing as it does in its ambition primary explanatory causality with efficient causality, hope to "save the phenomena" i.e. provide a universal cosmology within which all phenomena, from statics to mathematical classifications, theoretical physics to the hypotheses of astronomical motion and origins controversies, can hope eventually to rest — even in the loose ambience of a universal classificatory model?

While a unitary system of synthetization can be compared to a bag holding certain descriptions of phenomena, the analogy self-destructs if it is extended beyond the merely rhetorical form.

To recapitulate the proposition that provides the thrust of this thesis; what is contained in a cosmology ought to agree by a natural classification with what contains it; or else by the Duhemian understanding, one ought to accept that cosmologies are, in a sense, irrelevant to the empirical advance of any science but that as the philosophical artifices such as 'laws', and 'hypotheses' serve to economise by classification large bodies of knowledge, so the mind also seeks for deeper explanations of a reality which seems to evade the physical sciences other than by analogy, i.e. mathematical signification etc.

Cartesianism under this cruel light lies exposed as a vehicle less scientific than sentimental.

Nor for the Vienna Circle (and Ernst Mach) which refused, in the name of logical positivism any meaning deeper than the surface of things, would Descartes' methode suffice.

Caught between so many explanatory drifts (whether these are negative as is the case with Mach's positivism and its offspring, or positive, even to the extent of supporting explanations at the level of an W v. O Quinne's neo-Platonic group consciousness, Nietzsche's dreamy inconsequentialism, or Kant's classically rigorous transcendentalism, and the like) Cartesianism seems to speak now only for a great mood; not scientific as such but still of the spirit of science; an idiosyncratic but revered relative with nothing now to do, more nostalgic than dynamic, a survivor from its own rigorous time, less philosophy today than mind-set, but as such quite indestructible.

Note:- Einstein had reason to support Duhem’s position against the more irregular uses of Bohrean Quantum Physics, i.e. as expressed by, say, Sokal and Weinberg.

I raise the matter of Copenhagen School Quantum theories, not to make the case for Descartes’ Mechanism impossible (The Copenhagen "school" can render reason itself irrelevant, never mind objective reality) but merely to indicate that if a theory is completely viable it can be supported both positively and negatively and, ideally, can refute whatever stands to contradict it.

It is also desirable to acknowledge, at least, briefly the influence which later Bohrean extensions of the role of Quantum Physics has had upon so many disparate disciplines not directly associated with the empirical sciences. That many of these are in fact forms of science philosophies calls for the following extended note.