DESCARTES, Le Monde de Mr Descartes, 1664 EO

First edition.
Very rare copy with title page in unlisted condition in the name of Jacques Le Gras.

Descartes wrote this treatise in 1632 and 1633. He defended in particular the heliocentric system of Copernicus, but following Galileo's condemnation, he gave up publishing this work during his lifetime. It will not be finally published, according to his will, until after his death. At the end of 1663, the Le Gras and Clerselier family will dispute the privilege of publishing the posthumous works of Descartes. For the "World" it is Jacques Le Gras who will be the first to deposit the privilege. (cf. CARTESIAN BULLETIN V. (1976). Archives de Philosophie, 39 (3), 445–494) Jacques Le Gras, the holder of the privilege, then shared it with Thomas Girard (his brother-in-law) and Michel Bobin.

Our title page is unknown to Tchermerzine and Guibert as well as to Mathias Van Otegem who in his bibliography of the works of Descartes published in 2002, after consulting the copies in public libraries, describes only four states of the title page of this edition.
Our copy therefore presents a fifth state of the still unpublished title page.
Our title page has the same typographical mark as the Thomas Girad state (6 fleurons) canonically considered to adorn the true first edition. In addition, like the copy "Thomas Girad" from the Munich library (BSB: Rar. 4594) our title page is margined shorter than the rest of the book body and printed with the same characters, which suggests an impression at the same time.
The copies having a recomposed title page with a typographical mark "à l'oiseau" only coming, according to bibliographers, in a second step.

"In Le Monde, Descartes wants to ruin the concepts of scholasticism, and 'evacuate' Aristotle's physics, by giving a physical interpretation of the new heliocentric astronomy. As opposed to traditional finalism, he envisions, in the form of a "Fable", the mechanical formation of the cosmos, from an initial state of chaos (pieces of matter of various shapes and sizes agitated by all-out movements) and only by virtue of the general laws of nature: principle of inertia, laws of the communication of movement, etc ... "Robert Maggiori, Liberation, 26.