Arnold Geulincx, Samuel Beckett (contributor), Martin Wilson (translator) · 1665 (Treatise I); 1675 complete; Brill ed. 2006 · PDF · Calibre ID 8067
Resurfaced in The Two Clocks Problem (2026-09-25).
Role in the triad
Anchor and source of the figure: the two clocks, the baby in the cradle, occasionalism as the ground of ethics (ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis).
Why this book
The two-clock annotation (Ann. 19) gives the triad its image: correlation without causality, guaranteed by one artificer. The Brill edition prints it twice, once in Geulincx’s text and again in Beckett’s notes, which joins the axiom to Murphy and Molloy.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “It is the same as if two clocks agree precisely with each other and with the daily course of the Sun: when one chimes and tells the hours, the other also chimes and likewise indicates the hour; and all that without any causality in the sense of one having a causal effect on the other, but rather on account of mere dependence, inasmuch as both of them have been constructed with the same art and similar industry.” (Ann. to Tr. I, ch. II, sect. II, §2, Ann. 19, p. 232)
- “I do not know how such a thing is brought about, and it would be impudent of me to say that I do what I do not know how to do.” (Tr. I, ch. II, sect. II, §2 [4], p. 33)
- “Thus, I am a mere spectator of a machine whose workings I can neither adjust nor readjust.” (ibid. [8], p. 34)
- “It is just like a baby laid in his cradle: if he wishes the cradle to rock it sometimes rocks, though not because he wishes it, but because his mother or nurse, sitting beside it, wills it” (Ann. 19, p. 232)
- “the clock of my will and the clock of the world” (Ann. 48, p. 242)
- “wherein you have no power, therein you should not will” (Ann. 3 to Tr. I, ch. I, §2, p. 178)
Themes
Beckett · Cartesianism · humility · occasionalism · spectator · two clocks · will