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audience, as he went: each talk was progressively bolder. Starting from the radical new ground of individual human consciousness, which is able to manipulate the tool of reason, he laid out the Cartesian universe in all its machinelike regularity: from the Copernican view of the heavens, in which the earth is just one of many bodies revolving around just one of many suns, to the organs of the body, which depend not on a divine agency but on the proper physical conditions for their functioning. He delved into details: the action of the pulse, respiration, and even “de excrementis.” He largely ignored theology, openly ridiculed the Aristotelian categories, and presented Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood—which Descartes had taken up and made a central part of his own physiology—as the key to the body’s functioning. (While Descartes followed Harvey’s overall theory of circulation, he disagreed with Harvey’s thesis that the heart pumped blood. Descartes believed—wrongly, of course—that the heart acted like a furnace that heated the blood, causing it to circulate.)
    But while some intellectuals across Europe were poring over the
Discourse
and crediting it with creating a new framework for knowledge, the response to Cartesianism at Utrecht—arguably the first public reaction to the idea that we call modern—was different. At the end of Regius’s last talk, the packed room erupted in catcalls and chaos. The dignitaries stormed out. The mayhem was unprecedented, and a full-scale crisis was under way.
    For all his ambition, Descartes didn’t like direct confrontation, and he had kept away from Utrecht during this time. Regius, however, with his boxer’s face and querulous disposition, was all for mixing it up with the Aristotelians, which further inflamed the crisis. When a physician named Jacques Primerose challenged him on the theory of the circulation of the blood, Regius fired off an essay that he called “A Sponge to Wash Away the Filth of the Remarks Published by Dr. Primerose.”
    The real enemy, however, was Gysbert Voetius, who in addition to being a theologian and an Aristotelian was also the rector of the university. If Regius had recognized at once the sweeping promise of Descartes’ philosophy, Voetius—a small, intense, ferret-faced man—immediately saw the danger in it. Voetius mounted an attack on Regius, Descartes, and the “new philosophy,” charging that Copernican astronomy, which Descartes had taken as part of his system, was an affront to “sacred physics” that was creeping insidiously into the minds of the European intelligentsia and had to be eradicated. More to the point, Descartes had promised that his philosophy, grounded in his method, would bring sweeping new insights into nature—but according to Voetius this level of knowledge was not of this world but spiritual: it was of the order of the “Kingdom of Heaven” of which Jesus taught. “There is so much we do not know!” Voetius declaimed. Given that fact, the way to truth was not via the destructive doubting of all that had been carefully built up over the centuries but through cultivating and reverencing a “learned ignorance.”
    Voetius used his influence to wage his campaign against Cartesianism on several fronts. He warned that it was a road leading to the most dangerous of places the human mind could go: atheism. He and his supporters accused Descartes of being something akin to a cult leader, who kept his followers in thrall by means of personal magnetism. That was the real purpose of Cartesian doubt: by encouraging his followers to forget what they had learned from the ancient masters, Descartes was emptying their minds, so that he could fill them with his own teachings. Then, for good measure, and in the time-honored fashion of smear campaigns everywhere, Voetius and his allies accused Descartes of