It (your letter) would have made me perfectly happy if it hadn’t told me that the illness you had before I left The Hague has lingered on in the form of stomach troubles. The remedies you have chosen—involving •diet and •exercise—are in my opinion the best of all. Well, they are the best (all things considered) after the remedies of •the soul, which certainly has great power over the body, as is shown by the big changes that anger, fear, and the other passions arouse in it. But when the soul conducts the animal spirits to the places where they can help or harm, it does this not by directly willing the spirits to go in those ways but by willing or thinking of something else. For our body is so constructed that certain movements in it follow naturally upon certain thoughts: as we see that blushes follows from shame, tears from compassion, and laughter from joy. I know of no thought more conducive to continuing health than a strong conviction that our body is so well constructed that once we are healthy we can’t easily fall ill—unless we engage in some excess or are harmed by air pollution or some other external cause. Someone who is ill can restore his health solely by the power of nature, especially when he is still young. This •conviction is certainly much truer and more reasonable than the view of some people—I have seen this happen—who are influenced by an astrologer or a physician to think they must die in a certain amount of time, and are caused purely by this belief to become sick and even, often enough, to die. I couldn’t help being extremely sad if I thought that you were still unwell; I prefer to hope that the illness is all over; but my desire to be certain about this makes me eager to return to Holland.
reading the letter you did me the honour of writing to me, I couldn’t help being very distressed to see that such a rare and perfect ·level of· virtue isn’t accompanied by the health and prosperity that it deserves. I can readily understand the multitude of distressing things that keep turning up in your life—things that are made harder to overcome by being of such a kind that true reason doesn’t issue the command ‘Oppose them directly or try to chase them away’. These are domestic enemies that you are forced to keep company with, and you have to be perpetually on guard lest they injure you. The only remedy that I know is to channel your imagination and your senses as far from them as you can, and think about them, when prudence requires you to, using only your intellect.
In this matter it is easy, I think, to see how the intellect differs from the imagination and the senses. •Consider someone who has every reason to be happy but who continually sees enacted before him tragedies full of disastrous events, and who spends all his time brooding on sad and pitiful objects.
Suppose that he knows that these are imaginary fables: they draw tears from his eyes and move his imagination, but don’t touch his intellect at all. I think that this by itself would be enough gradually to constrict his heart and make him sigh in such a way that the circulation of his blood would be clogged and slowed down. The bigger parts of his blood, sticking together, could easily block the spleen, getting caught in it and stopping in its pores; while the more finely divided parts, being continually agitated, could affect his lungs and cause a cough which in time might be very dangerous. •Now consider someone who has countless genuine reasons for distress but who takes such trouble to direct his imagination that he never thinks about them except when some practical necessity forces him to, and who spends the rest of his time thinking about things that can give him contentment and joy. This will greatly help him by enabling him to make sounder judgments about the things that matter to him, because he’ll look on them without passion. Furthermore, I am sure that this by itself could restore him to health, even if his spleen and lungs were already in a poor condition because of the bad condition of the blood caused by sadness. Especially if he also used medical remedies to thin out the part of the blood causing the obstructions. The waters of Spa are very good for this purpose, I think, above all if while taking them you follow the usual recommendation of physicians and free your mind from all sad thoughts, and even from all serious meditations on scientific subjects. Simply imitate people who convince themselves that they aren’t thinking of anything when they are observing the greenness of a forest, the colours of a flower, the flight of a bird, or something else requiring no attention. This doesn’t waste time; it uses time well, because one can content oneself with the hope that by this means one will recover perfect health, which is the foundation of all the other goods of this life.
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I know that everything I write here is better known to you than to me, and that what’s difficult in this matter is not the theory but the practice. Still, the great favour that you do me in showing that you aren’t averse to hearing my views makes me take the liberty of writing them down just as they are, and of adding this: The remedy I have just suggested cured an illness of mine that was very like yours and perhaps even more dangerous. I was born of a mother who, a few days [actually, 14 months] after my birth, died from a disease of the lungs caused by distress. From her I inherited a dry cough and a pale colour which stayed with me until I was more than twenty, so that all the doctors who saw me predicted that I would die young. But I have always tended to look at things from the most favourable angle and to make my chief happiness depend upon myself alone; and I believe that this tendency caused the indisposition gradually to disappear completely—the indisposition that was almost part of my nature!
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Descartes
( from letters to Elizabeth)
