Bibliographic anchor
Deborah Boyle 
, “Descartes’ Natural Light Reconsidered,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 37, no. 4 (October 1999): 601–12.
John Morris, “Descartes’ Natural Light,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 11, no. 2, April 1973, 169-87.
James D. Collins, Descartes’ Philosophy of Nature, Oxford: Blackwell, 1971, see 85–87. Also downloadable from Dokumen.
What follows is based exclusively on the text provided (pp. 601–12). All quotations are verbatim from Boyle’s article as provided, with Boyle’s page numbers. The square bracket English translations of the Latin and French have been added and were not in the original. Click for English Translation Considerations below.
I. Boyle’s target: Morris’s 1973 “click of recognition” account
Boyle frames John Morris (1973) as offering the only sustained Anglophone treatment and as advancing a sharply determinate thesis: the “natural light” is a passive function of intellect that “recognizes” truth.
She presents Morris’s position in a compact quotation that is also the fulcrum for her rebuttal:
“a power of cognition, which contrasts with the ‘active’ power of conceiving. Unlike this power, it does not form ideas, or bring them to consciousness. Instead, it simply gives a click of recognition when a true idea is brought before it.” (Boyle 1999, 602)
Boyle immediately signals both the methodological weakness (insufficient textual basis) and the interpretive direction of her own project:
“However, the textual evidence for Morris’ interpretation of the natural light is slender, and in fact the texts support a quite different reading. I shall point out some problems with Morris’ reading, and offer the beginnings of an alternative account.” (Boyle 1999, 602)
So the dispute is not merely about terminology (“recognition” vs “perception”), but about the architecture of Descartes’s philosophy of mind and the division of labor between intellect and will, especially as articulated in Meditation IV.
II. Boyle’s central line of criticism: Morris mislocates activity/passivity and misreads Descartes’s development
A. The decisive structural point: Meditation IV and the intellect/will division
Boyle begins by re-centering the Meditations’ mature framework: intellect (passive perception of ideas as “subjects for possible judgments”) vs will (active affirmation/denial). She quotes Descartes to lock down the canonical functional contrast:
Intellect “allows him ‘to perceive the ideas which are subjects for possible judgements’ (CSM II 39/AT VII 56),” while the will “‘simply consists in our ability to do or not do something (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or avoid)’ (CSM II 41/AT VII 57).” (Boyle 1999, 602)
Then she supplies decisive textual support from Descartes’s 1641 letters and Passions, explicitly articulating the “passivity” of intellection and the “activity” of volition:
“strictly speaking, he says, ‘understanding [intellectio] is the passivity of the mind and willing [volitio] is its activity’ (CSMK III 182/AT III 372).” (Boyle 1999, 602)
“‘we should use the term “action” for what plays the role of a moving force, like volition in the mind, while we apply the term “passion” to what plays the role of something moved, like intellection [intellectio] and vision in the same mind’ (CSMK III 199/AT III 454–55).” (Boyle 1999, 602)
“while volitions are actions, ‘the various perceptions or modes of knowledge present in us may be called its passions, in a general sense’ (CSM I 335/AT XI 342).” (Boyle 1999, 602)
This sets up Boyle’s first deep objection: Morris’s picture trades on a Rules-era schema (an “active” and “passive” intellect) that Descartes outgrows once the will is installed as a distinct faculty in the Meditations.
Boyle’s developmental claim is direct:
“In the Meditations, Descartes’ philosophy of mind has expanded to provide a place for the will, which can take over the active functions previously assigned to the intellect.” (Boyle 1999, 603)
B. Morris’s reliance on the Rules: Boyle’s critique of the “seal/wax” move
Boyle identifies Morris’s argumentative starting point: a Rules passage where Descartes compares the cognitive power (vis cognoscens) to “seal” and “wax,” allegedly legitimating “active” vs “passive” intellect.
She then presses several distinct objections, each aimed at showing that Morris’s inference is illegitimate.
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1) Ingenium is not the active/passive split. Boyle denies that Morris’s active/passive distinction is what Descartes is doing with ingenium:
“First, it is not clear that Descartes means to equate the active and passive functions of the vis cognoscens with the two functions he calls ingenium; the functions of ingenium seem rather to be two uses among several to which the cognitive power can be put.” (Boyle 1999, 603)
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2) Ingenium is tied to imagination, whereas natural light is not. Boyle insists that the natural light involves “pure intellect” and does not “require turning to the imagination”:
“Furthermore, ingenium is explicitly said to be concerned with ideas in the corporeal imagination [phantasia], and Descartes appears to contrast it with the cognitive ability ‘when it acts on its own’—that is, with pure intellect (CSM I 41/AT X 416). The natural light, we shall see, involves the operation of pure intellect, and does not require turning to the imagination in any way; hence it cannot be equivalent to either the passive or the active aspect of the ‘native intelligence’ Descartes mentions here.” (Boyle 1999, 603)
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3) No evidence Descartes retains the two-role intellect after the Rules.
“Moreover, there is no evidence that Descartes continued, after the time of the Rules, to maintain that the intellect itself had active and passive roles.” (Boyle 1999, 603)
These claims are not peripheral. They are Boyle’s core methodological insistence: one must not read the Meditations through an early cognitive schema that Descartes revises once he develops the intellect/will distinction.
C. Terminological engineering: Boyle dismantles Morris’s connaître/concevoir [to know/to conceive] apparatus
Morris’s apparatus depends on a lexical thesis: connaître expresses the passive “recognition/knowing” and concevoir (or Latin percipere) expresses the active “conceiving/bringing-to-consciousness.” Boyle’s rebuttal is that the French Meditations do not behave as Morris requires.
Boyle states the key point as a flat contradiction of Morris’s partition:
“Descartes indeed refers to a puissance de connaître [power to know], which he equates with the entendement, or understanding, and to a puissance désirer [power to desire], or volonté, will (AT IX 45). . . . On the next page, Descartes refers to ‘la puissance d’entendre ou de concevoir’ [the power to hear or conceive] (AT IX 46); again, the puissance de concevoir [power to conceive] is equated with the understanding. In other words, connaître and concevoir both seem to pertain to the understanding in general, not to distinct parts of the understanding.” (Boyle 1999, 605)
Then Boyle delivers a decisive exegetical observation: the very passage uses percipio/conçois [prceive/conceive] with the understanding that Morris wants to reserve for “conceiving” as a separate active power.
“Descartes characterizes the entendement [understanding], which he has just equated with the puissance de connaître [power of knowing], as that by which he perceives ideas; in the Latin original he uses the verb percipio [perceive] (AT VII 56), and in the French translation it is conçois [perceive] (AT IX 45). But, as we have seen, Morris wants to match instances of the verbs concevoir [to perceive] and percipere [to perceive] with the supposedly active puissance de concevoir [power of perceiving], and not with the supposedly passive puissance de connaître [power of knowing]. Clearly, the passage at AT IX 45 flies in the face of Morris’ interpretation.” (Boyle 1999, 605)
Boyle’s conclusion is unambiguous:
“Thus it seems that there is really no textual evidence for Morris’ claims that Descartes distinguished two functions of understanding, that these ‘are called’ the power of recognizing and the power of conceiving, and that they are, respectively, passive and active.” (Boyle 1999, 606)
D. Boyle’s pressure point against Morris: the will’s role makes Morris’s natural light redundant or incoherent
This is where Boyle’s critique becomes philosophically decisive rather than merely philological.
Morris’s “click” model assigns to the natural light the function of “recognizing” truth. Boyle argues that this function belongs to the will’s assent, and so Morris either (a) renders the will idle, or (b) smuggles an act of assent into a “passive” faculty.
Boyle sets up the objection by quoting Morris’s claim:
“it simply gives a click of recognition when a true idea is brought before it.” (Boyle 1999, 608)
Then she makes the systematic objection explicit:
“This reading contrasts with John Morris’ interpretation of the natural light in an important way, for Morris ignores the role of the will in his account. Indeed, if his account were right, it would render the will superfluous in Descartes’ system.” (Boyle 1999, 610)
Boyle diagnoses a collapse in the Meditations’ official story about clarity/distinctness and truth:
“On a reading like Morris’, Descartes would be read as suggesting that the will is wholly inclined to assent to a claim when—and because—the understanding already recognizes that the claim is true. And if that is so, then it seems a judgment has somehow already been made, before the will enters the picture.” (Boyle 1999, 610)
“But Descartes emphasizes at the end of the Fourth Meditation that it is on the basis of the clarity and distinctness of a proposition that one judges that proposition to be true; the former are criteria of the latter.” (Boyle 1999, 610)
“On the reading which Morris seems forced to give, Descartes’ distinction between clarity and distinctness on the one hand and truth on the other hand collapses.” (Boyle 1999, 610)
Finally, Boyle adds a regress objection that directly attacks “recognition” readings:
“Indeed, the natural light should not be taken as a power of recognition at all, for any such interpretation opens the door to an infinite regress: to recognize that some perception is clear and distinct is presumably to judge that it is clear and distinct, and so a judgment seems to be necessary even before the perception is judged to be true.” (Boyle 1999, 611)
III. Boyle’s positive proposal: natural light as luminous intellectual perception of propositions, inseparable from volitional assent
A. Natural light belongs (strictly) to intellect as passive perception, but it is “very closely tied” to will
Boyle’s definitive formulation is:
“the natural light is indeed passive, … because Descartes associates it with the ‘power of understanding’ [vim intelligendi], where that is contrasted with the will. However, the natural light is very closely tied to the operation of the will; when the intellect perceives some proposition particularly clearly and distinctly, the will feels itself compelled to assert the truth of that proposition, and in these cases Descartes says that the natural light has shone.” (Boyle 1999, 612)
This is the heart of Boyle’s interpretation: the “light” is intellectual clarity/distinctness with respect to propositions; the will’s assent is an immediate, practically inseparable sequel.
B. Boyle’s core textual anchor: “great light in the intellect” followed by “great inclination in the will”
Boyle treats the Fourth Meditation passage as a functional description of what it is for something to be “shown by the natural light”:
“I could not but judge that something which I understood so clearly was true; but this was not because I was compelled so to judge by any external force, but because a great light in the intellect was followed by a great inclination in the will.” (Boyle 1999, 609; Descartes citation: CSM II 41/AT VII 58–59)
C. Natural light illuminates propositions to which assent is compelled
Boyle states the upshot in a compressed, systematic form:
“The truths illuminated by the natural light, then, are propositions to which the will feels compelled to assent: some proposition is perceived so clearly and distinctly that it is as if a great light has illuminated the proposition in the mind, and the will immediately grants that the proposition is true.” (Boyle 1999, 610)
Boyle explicitly rejects attributing “recognition” to the natural light; instead she recasts the phenomenon as illumination of perception plus inevitable assent:
“Rather, we should read Descartes as saying that particularly clear and distinct perception makes the intellect seem to be illuminated by a great light, and the assent of the will invariably follows.” (Boyle 1999, 611)
She then allows a looser, derivative sense in which “natural light” can be called active, not because the intellect has an “active” function (Morris’s mistake), but because the will’s activity is inseparable from the illuminated perception:
“This inseparability of the operation of the passive natural light from the operation of the active will might even entitle us to call the natural light, more broadly speaking, active.” (Boyle 1999, 610)
IV. Why Boyle’s interpretation is superior to Morris’s, on Boyle’s own argumentative standards
Boyle’s superiority case is an integrated triad of virtues.
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It fits the mature faculty-psychology of the Meditations.
“I have argued that although Morris is right to associate the natural light with the passive function of intellect, he is wrong to claim that the intellect has an additional active function; Descartes did attribute active and passive roles to the intellect in his early Rules, but only because he had not yet developed his later distinction between intellect and will.” (Boyle 1999, 612)
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It avoids collapsing clarity/distinctness into truth.
“On the reading which Morris seems forced to give, Descartes’ distinction between clarity and distinctness on the one hand and truth on the other hand collapses.” (Boyle 1999, 610)
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It blocks regress by refusing to treat natural light as a “recognition” faculty.
“the natural light should not be taken as a power of recognition at all, for any such interpretation opens the door to an infinite regress…” (Boyle 1999, 611)
V. Critical assessment: where Boyle is strongest, and where her account still invites pressure
Boyle’s criticisms of Morris are compelling on the evidence she marshals. The decisive point is systematic: Morris’s “click” model assigns to a “passive” intellectual power a function that behaves like volitional assent.
However, Boyle’s own account invites two pressures, even within pp. 601–12.
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A. Does “inevitable” assent overstate Descartes’s freedom of suspension? Boyle characterizes the sequel from illuminated perception to assent as unavoidable:
“the assent of the will invariably follows.” (Boyle 1999, 611)
“it is impossible, Descartes would say, for someone to perceive the idea and not assent.” (Boyle 1999, 610)
Given Boyle’s own emphasis on volition’s role in directing attention (Boyle 1999, 608), one can press whether inevitability should be restricted to cases where the subject sustains attention on the clear and distinct content.
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B. Is Boyle’s account too deflationary: does it reduce “natural light” to “clear and distinct perception”? Boyle notes her scope explicitly:
“offer the beginnings of an alternative account.” (Boyle 1999, 602)
Still, one can ask whether “natural light” is doing explanatory work beyond labeling a familiar epistemic situation (clarity/distinctness plus compelled assent).
VI. Boyle’s conclusion against Morris, in her own words
Boyle’s concluding verdict rejects Morris’s core characterization:
“In sum, the natural light is not, as Morris claims, a ‘power of cognition, which contrasts with the “active” power of conceiving’ and which gives a ‘click of recognition when a true idea is brought before it.’ ” (Boyle 1999, 611)
And she states her replacement view in a compact form:
“although by ‘natural light’ strictly speaking Descartes means only the perception of certain ideas in the intellect, which is a passive operation, there is a sense in which the natural light is active, insofar as the active will inevitably asserts the truth of whatever proposition has been illuminated by the natural light.” (Boyle 1999, 610)
That is Boyle’s superiority claim: she preserves Descartes’s mature faculty architecture while capturing the felt compulsion of natural-light episodes, without turning natural light into a judgment-like “recognition” faculty.
English Translation Considerations
Why “puissance de concevoir” need not be translated as “power of conceiving” here
Puissance de concevoir can be translated as “power of conceiving.” The reason to hesitate (or to choose a less committal English rendering like “power of understanding” / “power of apprehending”) is not that “power of conceiving” is linguistically illegitimate, but that, in this precise dialectical context, that English phrase too easily smuggles in exactly the technical contrast Morris needs and Boyle is denying.
1) Boyle’s target is Morris’s technical bifurcation within the understanding
Boyle’s central point in the surrounding paragraphs is that Morris tries to manufacture, out of the French vocabulary, two distinct sub-powers of the understanding:
- puissance de connaître = a passive “recognition/knowing” function
- puissance de concevoir = an active “conceiving/bringing-to-consciousness” function
Boyle argues that the French text does not support treating these as two distinct parts of the intellect. She writes that puissance de connaître is equated with the understanding and that puissance de concevoir is also equated with the understanding (Boyle 1999, 605). So translating puissance de concevoir as “power of conceiving” risks sounding, to an English reader, like it names a separate faculty (a discrete “conceiving power”)—which is exactly Morris’s move. Boyle’s stance is that Descartes is not introducing a distinct faculty here; he is piling up near-synonyms for the understanding.
2) “Conceiving” in English invites the active concept-formation gloss Boyle is resisting
In ordinary philosophical English, “conceive” often suggests forming or constructing a concept (or at least an “active” mental operation). That is precisely the sense Morris wants to attach to concevoir/percipere, which Boyle reports as “to bring an idea or concept before the mind” (Boyle 1999, 604).
Boyle’s rebuttal in the cited passage is that the French translator uses conçois (from concevoir) exactly where the Latin is percipio—in a passage describing the understanding as that by which one perceives ideas. Her point is: if concevoir is functioning there as the translation of percipere (perception/apprehension), then it cannot be reserved for a special “active” power opposed to connaître. So “power of conceiving” is pragmatically risky in this setting because it encourages the very “active concept-forming” reading Boyle is trying to block.
3) Boyle’s neutralization strategy: treat the French as overlapping labels for the understanding, not distinct operations
Boyle’s conclusion is explicit: connaître and concevoir “both seem to pertain to the understanding in general, not to distinct parts of the understanding” (Boyle 1999, 605). Given that claim, the most Boyle-faithful English is one that does not pre-commit the reader to a Morris-style faculty distinction. That is why an expository choice like “power of understanding” (or “power of apprehending/perceiving”) is often preferable, even if “power of conceiving” is a possible literal rendering.
Put sharply: “power of conceiving” is not wrong as French-to-English; it is pragmatically risky in this argumentative context because it makes it too easy to hear Descartes as naming the very “active” sub-power Boyle says he is not naming.
A Boyle-consistent translation set (for expository purposes)
If the aim is to keep the English aligned with Boyle’s stance (and with her key pairing percipio ↔ conçois), then the following translation choices are typically best:
- puissance de connaître → [power of knowing/understanding] (general)
- puissance de concevoir → [power of understanding/apprehending/perceiving] (still general, not a distinct “concept-forming” faculty)
- conçois (AT IX 45) → [I perceive / I apprehend / I understand] (mirroring percipio)
- percipio (AT VII 56) → [I perceive / I apprehend]
This preserves Boyle’s central claim that AT IX 45 undermines Morris’s attempt to reserve concevoir/percipere for an “active” function distinct from connaître.