What kept Hector and Andromache warm in windy Troy?

David Simpson

• The Vehement Passions by Philip Fisher
  Princeton, 268 pp, £18.95, May 2002, ISBN 0 691 06996 4

In the opening sentences of his last published work, The Passions of the Soul (1649), Descartes signalled his own modernity with a withering dismissal of the ancients, whose defects he found ‘nowhere more apparent than in their writings on the passions’, writings so ‘meagre and for the most part so implausible’ that he could only write as if ‘I were considering a topic that no one had dealt with before me’. His own psychology, which depended on a fluid mechanics whereby the ‘continual heat in our hearts’ is distributed through the body by the pineal gland (the de facto location of the soul), no longer looks so modern. But the declared redundancy of the classics would continue to mark much of the scientific project throughout the long modernity which may or may not have now come to an end, wrecked or perhaps just beached on the shores of the Postmodern.