Abstract

Marin Cureau de La Chambre is generally considered to be a lesser figure on the intellectual landscape of seventeenth century France, best known for his theory of instinct, animal cognition, and the passions. In this paper, my principal aim is to examine Cureau’s thoughts about the vegetative powers, based on his only work in which he touched upon this subject: The System of the Soul. In that work, Cureau offers a general explanation of how cognition works in living creatures, and – rather unusually – he attributes cognition to every living thing, including plants. Even more unusually, perhaps, he offers an analogical explanation of how orderly and goal-directed inanimate processes might occur in nature, but he claims that here we are only dealing with “the shadow of cognition”. In providing an account of Cureau’s ideas about the vegetative powers, I shall outline his general theory of cognition, based on images; then I will contrast the workings of the vegetative soul with those of the higher order souls; and finally I shall explain the difference between the animate and the inanimate parts of nature, arguing for the conclusion that Cureau wanted to navigate between what was perceived as the Aristotelian tradition and the “moderns” of seventeenth century science, siding more with the latter in attributing a greater independence of the created universe from its Creator.