Kuroda by Gaston Bachelard - The Formation of the Scientific Mind

The Formation of the Scientific Mind , by Gaston Bachelard, 1938.

One can find examples where very great minds are, so to speak, stuck in the primary imagery. To question the clarity and distinction of the image offered by the sponge is, for Descartes, to steal explanations without reason. I don't know why, when we wanted to explain how a body is rarefied, we preferred to say that it was by increasing its quantity than to use the example of this sponge. In other words, the image of the sponge is sufficient in a particular explanation, so it can be used to organize various experiences. Why look any further? Why not think along this general theme? Why not generalize what is clear and simple? Let us therefore explain complicated phenomena with material of simple phenomena, just as one elucidates a complex idea by breaking it down into simple ideas.

That the details of the image become veiled should not lead us to abandon this image. We hold it by one aspect, that is enough. Descartes' confidence in the clarity of the image of the sponge is very symptomatic of this powerlessness to install doubt at the level of the details of objective knowledge, to develop a discursive doubt which would disarticulate all the links of the real, all the angles images. General doubt is easier than particular doubt. And we should have no difficulty in believing that the rarefaction does not take place as I say, although we do not perceive by any of our senses the body which fills (the pores of a rarefied body), because it does not There is no reason which obliges us to believe that we must perceive by our senses all the bodies which are around us, and that we see that it is very easy to explain it in this way, and that it is impossible to imagine it otherwise. In other words: a sponge shows us sponginess. It shows us how a particular matter is filled with another matter. This lesson of heterogeneous plenitude suffices to explain everything. The metaphysics of space in Descartes is the metaphysics of the sponge.

The Formation of the Scientific Mind , by Gaston Bachelard, 1938.