DESCARTES

NOTES AGAINST A CERTAIN BROADSHEET

[348] . . . I am the first person to have considered thought to be the distinctive attribute of incorporeal substance, and extension as the distinctive attribute of corporeal substance. But I have not said that these attributes inhere in them as if in subjects distinct from themselves. And here we must be careful not to understand ‘attribute’ as meaning no more than ‘mode’ (for we apply the word ‘attribute’ to anything we recognise as belonging to a thing naturally, whether a variable mode or the very essence of the thing, which is obviously immutable). So: God contains many attributes, but no modes. Again, one of the attributes of every substance is its self-subsistence. Again, the extension of a given body can indeed admit of various modes, since its mode is different if the body is spherical from what it is if it is square; but the extension itself, which is the subject of those modes, considered in itself, is not a mode of corporeal substance, [349] but the attribute which constitutes its essential nature. Finally, there are various modes of thought, since affirming is a different mode of thought from denying, and so on; but thought itself, as the internal principle from which these modes arise and in which they inhere, is not conceived as a mode, but as the attribute which constitutes the nature of a certain substance; and the present question is whether this substance is corporeal or incorporeal. . . .