"Descartes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... or more frequently have none at all. After an hour or two passed in discourse, I went to my study till dinner; beginning with some philosophical work, such as the logic of Port-Royal, Locke's Essays, Mallebranche, Leibtnitz, Descartes, etc. I soon found that these authors perpetually contradict each other, and formed the chimerical project of reconciling them, which cost me much labor and loss of time, bewildering my head without any profit. At length (renouncing this ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... origin as the more celebrated Academie francaise. A number of men of science had for some thirty years met together, first at the house of P. Marsenne, then at that of Montmort, a member of the Council of State, afterwards at that of Melchisedec Thevenot, the learned traveller. It included Descartes, Gassendi, Blaise and Etienne Pascal. Hobbes, the author of Leviathan, was presented to it during his visit to Paris in 1640. Colbert conceived the idea of giving an official status to this learned club. A number of chemists, physicians, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... comparison with what remains to be known; and that we could be free of an infinitude of maladies both of body and mind, and even also possibly of the infirmities of age, if we had sufficient knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies with which nature has provided us. (Descartes: Discourse on the Method, Philosophical Works. Translated by E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Vol. I, Cam. Univ. Press, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... he is French to the core. No part of his admirable country is more characteristically national. Normandy is Normandy, Burgundy is Burgundy, Provence is Provence; but Touraine is essentially France. It is the land of Rabelais, of Descartes, of Balzac, of good books and good company, as well as good dinners and good houses. George Sand has somewhere a charming passage about the mildness, the convenient quality, of the physical conditions of central France—"son climat souple et chaud, ses pluies abondantes et courtes." ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... CARTESIAN, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum—whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum— "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... And, so far as I know, the first person who gave expression to this modern view of physiology, who was bold enough to enunciate the proposition that vital phenomena, like all the other phenomena of the physical world, are, in ultimate analysis, resolvable into matter and motion, was Rene Descartes. ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... connection which exists between two different ideas is an imbecile. As a matter of fact, love has its great men although they be unrecognized, as war has its Napoleons, poetry its Andre Cheniers and philosophy its Descartes. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... wisdom, we find that we have shut something out. Wisdom is the free, active life of a growing and attaching soul. We must not only attach information to ourselves, we must assimilate it. Else we are like a crab which should drag about Descartes, or as an ocean sucker which should ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... incessant wish for verification—to be sure, by tiresome seeing and hearing, that they are facts. The old excitement of thought has half died out, or rather it is diffused in quiet pleasure over a life instead of being concentrated in intense and eager spasms. An old philosopher—a Descartes, suppose—fancied that out of primitive truths, which he could by ardent excogitation know, he might by pure deduction evolve the entire universe. Intense self-examination, and intense reason would, he thought, make out everything. ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... venture to say of Lamarck what Huxley once said of Descartes, that he expressed "the thoughts which will be everybody's two or three centuries after" him. Only the change of belief, due to the rapid accumulation of observed facts, has come in a period shorter than "two or three centuries;" for, at the end of the very century in which Lamarck, ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... six volumes of similar sermons must have exhausted the matter, and on his proposal the Academy decided that, in future, it would give as the subject of the eloquence prize, the eulogiums of the great men of the nation. Marshal Saxe, Duguay Trouin, Sully, D'Aguesseau, Descartes, figured first on this list. Later, the Academy felt itself authorized to propose the eloge of kings themselves; it entered on this new branch at the beginning of 1767, by asking for the eloge ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... other hand if we find universal recognition of some fundamental truth, a common cogito ergo sum, or the like, acknowledged by all philosophers, we have made a discovery as satisfactory in its way as is acceptance of the complex system of philosophy offered by Plato or Descartes. There seems to be no real reason why it should not be quite as worth while to take a similar census of ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... force is to the singer a definite, controllable power. "Various terms have been applied to this mysterious force. Plato called it 'the soul of the world.' Others called it the 'plastic spirit of the world,' while Descartes gave it the afterward popular name of 'animal spirits.' The Stoics called it simply 'nature,' which is now generally changed to 'nervous principle.'" "The far-reaching results of so quiet and yet so tremendous a force may be seen in the lives of the men and women who have the mental acumen to ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... were not only not of value, but to some extent at least hindered human progress by diverting men from the field of observation to that of speculation. It is interesting to realize that Averroes did in his time what Descartes did many centuries later, and many another brilliant thinker ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... achieving the gain of some special piece of knowledge, and we find such definite aims in psychology, and certain systems of philosophy—Greek, English, and German, in Plato Locke, Kant, and in the meditations of Descartes, and many others. Self-analysis is the basis of psychological knowledge, but the science has been chiefly used to explain the methods by which we obtain knowledge of the outer world in relation to ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... vague use of "dream material" is preferred and it is only by good luck that the real settings-of-ideas come into account. Jung, no less than Freud, has forgotten that philosophy has become mechanistic since Descartes'[21] famous year of 1637, and Jung would throw us back to the early seventeenth century, with his energic conception of the Libido, or the Ur-libido, now called Horme and sometimes merely elan vital. And this, fifty years after Herbert Spencer's tremendous emphasis ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... few further remarks may justify this somewhat severe estimate. After stating that in the solution of life and soul problems, science stops short at germs and nucleated cells, he proceeds with the usual tirade against metaphysics: "Take Descartes' fundamental axiom: Cogito ergo sum.... Is it really an axiom?... If the fact that I am conscious of thinking proves the fact that I exist, is the converse true that whatever does not think does not exist?... Does a child only begin to exist when it begins to think? If Cogito ergo sum ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... the following are among the chiefs who helped to transform the mental fabric of Europe in the age of Louis XIV: Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, Locke, Boyle. Under these leaders the first firm irreversible advance was made out of the dim twilight of theology into the clear dawn ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... brief and well-timed reference to the accomplished Hypatia, familiar to ladies from Kingsley's novel—in the days when ladies used to read novels—and also the Royal ladies whom Descartes and Leibnitz found apter disciples than the savants. It was, however, he remarked, an impertinence to suppose that any apology was needed for introducing such subjects before ladies. He plunged therefore at once in medias ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... Leibnitz do not understand him now. If he were no more than what he is described in the book before us—if his metaphysics were 'miserable,' if his philosophy was absurd, and he himself nothing more than a second-rate disciple of Descartes—we can assure M. de Careil that we should long ago have heard the last ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... as the pillars of heaven, or (to speak philosophically) as the great laws of Nature, by which, under God, the universe is sustained. Can you seriously think that because the hypothesis of your countryman Descartes, which was nothing but an ingenious, well-imagined romance, has been lately exploded, the system of Newton, which is built on experiments and geometry—the two most certain methods of discovering truth—will ever fail? Or that, because the whims ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... and therefore all the welcomer to him; delineated always with a kind of mockery, but with evident love. What excellences are in England, thought Voltaire; no Bastille in it, for one thing! Newton's Philosophy annihilated the vortexes of Descartes for him; Locke's Toleration is very grand (especially if all is uncertain, and YOU are in the minority); then Collins, Wollaston and Company,—no vile Jesuits here, strong in their mendacious mal-odorous stupidity, despicablest yet most dangerous ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... spite of Professor Huxley's dictum, is contributing a good deal to the general doctrine of evolution; for though Descartes and Leibnitz may have thrown out hints pointing more or less broadly in the direction of evolution, some of which Professor Huxley has quoted, he has adduced nothing approaching to the passage from Buffon given above, either in respect of the clearness with which the ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... arguments of Spinosa, and Descartes, and other advocates of the 'Material system', (or, in more appropriate language, the 'Atheistical system!') it is admitted by all men not prejudiced, not biassed by sceptical prepossessions, that 'mind' is distinct from 'matter'. The mind ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... Montaigne and Descartes, seduced at an early age by the allurements of gambling, managed at length to overcome the evil, presenting examples of reformation—which proves that this mania is not absolutely incurable. Descartes became a gamester in his seventeenth year; ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... their reading of the phenomena on this principle, we find curious gradations between the higher and the humbler orders of minds. The vortices of Descartes, for instance, involve but a simple idea, that might have been struck out by almost any individual of a tolerably lively fancy, who had walked by the side of a winding river, and seen sticks and straws revolving in its eddies. But no fancy, however active, or no ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... in Paris. The works of Descartes drew him to philosophy. The famous dictum, "Malebranche saw all things in God," had reference to his treatise, De la Recherche de la Verite, ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... Chatham, 11 at Pembroke, 4 at Deptford, 4 at Woolwich, and one at Mill wall.—Total 39." The French naval force in the Black Sea, under the command of Vice-admiral Hamelin, was composed of the Friedland, Valmy, Ville de Paris, Henri IV., Bayard, Charlemagne, Lena, Lupiter, Marengo, Gomer, Descartes, Vauban, Mogador, Cacique, Magellan, Sane, Caton, Serieuse, Mercure, Oliviere, Beaumanoir, Cerf, Promethee, Salamandre, Heron, and Monette. The squadron of Viceadmiral Bruat, intended to act in the Black Sea, the Sea of Gallipoli, and in the Eastern Archipelago, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of cookery, as Descartes, of French philosophy. It is said that Gonthier, in less than ten years, invented seven cullises, nine ragouts, thirty-one sauces, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... France was the influence of the salons, which, as all the world knows, were reunions of both sexes, where conversation ran along the whole gamut of subjects, from the frothiest vers de societe to the philosophy of Descartes. Richelieu had set the fashion of uniting a taste for letters with the habits of polite society and the pursuits of ambition; and in the first quarter of the seventeenth century there were already several hotels ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... ultimate evolution of our own time, was effected on the one side by psychological analysis, and on the other by the direct and experimental observation of nature. Setting aside the gradual preparation which led up to this point, we can consider Descartes and Galileo as the representatives of these two great factors; since the one by the analysis of thought, the other by natural experiments, overthrew the mythical ideas, although without being aware that the achievement would produce such ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... had no property in them. Newton spent many years of his life in the composition of his "Principia," yet in that he had no copyright, except for the mere clothing in which his ideas were placed before the world. The body was common property. So, too, with Bacon and Locke, Leibnitz and Descartes, Franklin, Priestley, and Davy, Quesnay, Turgot, and Adam Smith, Lamarck and Cuvier, and all other men who have aided in carrying science to the point at which it has now arrived. They have had no property in their ideas. If they labored, ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... Descartes, following Bacon, had much to do with the establishment of method, although he laid more stress upon deduction than upon induction. With Bacon he believed that there was need of a better method of finding out the truth than that of logic. He was strong in his refusal ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... was small hope for any swimmer in such a sea." Cassion's eyes turned to the others in the boat. "And you, Descartes, you were in the canoe with the Sieur de Artigny, tell us again what happened, and if this be not ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... university was then under the Puritan control of Dr. John Owen; but not even his effort to redeem the university from its reputation for intellectual laxity rescued it from the "wrangling and ostentation" of the peripatetic philosophy. Yet it was at Oxford that he encountered the work of Descartes which first attracted him to metaphysics. There, too, he met Pocock, the Arabic scholar, and Wallis the mathematician, who must at least have commanded his respect. In 1659 he accepted a Senior Studentship of his college, ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... trample beneath their feet everything that lies in their way, we do not say they are insane, but mad. "Man is an intelligent spirit," or mind, "served by an organism." We know that mind exists by our consciousness of that which passes within us. The propriety of the sayings of Descartes, "I think, therefore I am," rests upon the consciousness that we are thinking beings. This intelligence is not obtained by the exercise of any of the senses. It does not depend upon external surroundings. Its existence ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... saloons of the Rambouillet mansion, the selectest literary genius and fame of France were proud and glad to assemble for the discussion and criticism of literature. Here came Balzac and Voiture; here Corneille read aloud his masterpieces before they were represented on the stage; here Descartes philosophized; here the large and splendid genius of Bossuet first unfolded itself to the world; here Madame de Sevigne brought her bright, incisive wit, trebly commended by stainless reputation, unwithering beauty, and charming ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... or as we say character, 'have its course.' Nor have we fared better under the common daylight, for pure reason has notoriously made but light of practical reason, and has been made but light of in its turn, from that morning when Descartes discovered that he could think better in his bed than out of it; nor needed I original thought to discover, being so late of the school of Morris, that machinery had not separated from handicraft wholly for the world's good; nor to notice that the distinction of classes ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... avoiding both parties. I had, however, the pleasure to think that two of the principal persons of my company stood well with either one or another party. The Cardinal de Lenoncourt had been thought to favour the Huguenot party, and M. Descartes, brother to the Bishop of Lisieux, was supposed to have the Spanish interest at heart. I communicated our difficult situation to the Princesse de Roche-sur-Yon and Madame de Tournon, who, considering that we could not reach La Fere in less than five or six days, answered me, with tears ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... for ever!" said Claude, one afternoon, in the inn garden at Beddgelert, "and say, not with Descartes, 'I think, therefore I exist;' but simply, 'I enjoy, therefore I exist.' I almost think those Emersonians are right at times, when they crave the 'life of plants, and stones, and rain.' Stangrave said to me once, that ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... impossible to fall in love with the physically defective and sincerely to believe that they are beautiful. Take that incident mentioned by Descartes. He said that when he was a child he used to play with a little girl who had a squint, and that to the end of his days he liked people who squinted. In this case it was the associations of memory that gave ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... who died shortly after Delsarte, being lessened, and conscientious and patient study having fed the flame in that vast brain, we might have obtained affirmations of a new order. And Delsarte might have met with thinkers like Leibnitz, Descartes and Jean Reynaud, on that height where religion is purged of superstition and fanaticism, philosophy set free from atheism ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... the enlarged schoolboy was, I think, really the attitude of the best minds then and onwards to Descartes and Spinoza. They gave themselves up to the study of nature without ceasing to belong to their school, yet freed, as on a holiday, from the constraint of being actually in it. Yet, in regard to their ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... of Descartes in the sixteenth century prepared the way for Locke, Newton and Leibnitz; and his system, although now little used, was really the foundation of what followed. He is said to have given new and fresher impulse to mathematical and philosophical study than any ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... religious culture by ancestral descent, and the intermarriage of religious families, so strangely end in the production of children totally devoid of moral sense and religious sentiment—moral imbeciles in short."[245-1] From such considerations of the necessity of physical vigor to elevated thought, Descartes predicted that if the human race ever attain perfection it will be chiefly through the art of medicine. Not alone from emotions of sympathy did the eminent religious teachers of past ages maintain that the alleviation and prevention of suffering is ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... Descartes was horribly persecuted in Holland, when he first published his opinions. Voetius, a bigot of great influence at Utrecht, accused him of atheism, and had even projected in his mind to have this philosopher burnt at Utrecht in an extraordinary fire, which, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... is, where to begin. Descartes commenced his book with the words "Cogito, ergo sum." "I think, therefore I am," and we cannot do better than follow his example. There are two things about which we cannot have any doubt—our own existence, ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... liberate the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to the reason has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as yet by any means accomplished. On the one side Descartes and Bacon, Spinoza and Locke, are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the Renaissance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. The whole movement of the Reformation ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Hobbes in his time was a friend of, and, it is said, a translator for, Lord Bacon; and Ben Jonson, that ripe scholar, revised his sound translation of "Thucydides." He sat at the feet of Galileo and by the side of Gassendi and Descartes. While in Fetter Lane he associated with Harvey, Selden, and Cowley. He talked and wrangled with the wise men of half Europe. He had sat at Richelieu's table and been loaded with honours by Cosmo de Medici. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... though they cannot attain to an adequate idea of the Deity, yet discover so much of him as enables them to see the end of their creation, and the means of their happiness; whereas they who take this high priori road (such as Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, and some better reasoners) for one that goes right, ten lose themselves in mists, or ramble after visions, which deprive them of all right of their end, and mislead them in the choice of the ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... are able to think, then you must acknowledge that man is able to think without a soul, or you must acknowledge that the soul is not the essential principle of thought and action. Until after the time of Descartes, who later argued philosophically that animals were only machines, it was scarcely possible to argue rationally about the ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... go wrong in recommending Berkeley's Human Knowledge, Descartes' Discours sur la Methode, Locke's Conduct of the Understanding, Lewes' History of Philosophy; while, in order to keep within the number one hundred, I can only mention Moliere and Sheridan among dramatists. Macaulay considered ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... strong party prejudices, made England the reverse of a pleasant retirement, for either Hobbes or his patrons; so, perceiving the outbreak of the Revolution, he emigrated to Paris. There in the enjoyment of the company of Gassendi and Descartes, with the elite of Parisian genius, he was for awhile contented and happy. Here he engaged in a series of mathematical quarrels, which were prolonged throughout the whole of his life, on the quadrature of the circle. Seven years ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... believed in the certainty of moral truths. He knew that there was a reality in justice, in friendship, in courage. Like Job, he reposed on consciousness. He turned his attention to what afterwards gave immortality to Descartes. To the scepticism of the Sophists he opposed self-evident truths. He proclaimed the sovereignty of virtue, the universality of moral obligation. "Moral certitude was the platform from which he would survey the universe." It was the ladder by which ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... enquiry—and such was the case also at the opening of the "modern" era. Speaking generally, it may be said that as knowledge of natural law extended, the idea of mental activities in external nature was ousted. Mechanical views of the universe gradually prevailed, and reached a passing climax in Descartes' contention that even ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... feelings and mental processes, of free argument upon institutions and government. In relation to knowledge, it is the spirit of science, and the study of science, which is the essential intellectual fact in modern history, dates from just this time, from Bacon and Newton and Descartes. In relation to literature, it is the spirit of criticism, and criticism in England is the creation of the seventeenth century. The positive temper, the attitude of realism, is everywhere in the ascendant. The sixteenth ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting it either in revelation, the consensus gentium, the instincts of the heart, or the systematized experience of the race. Others make the perceptive moment its own test,—Descartes, for instance, with his clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God; Reid with his 'common-sense;' and Kant with his forms of synthetic judgment a priori. The inconceivability of the opposite; ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Paris for his books, his meditations, and for his immortal work, and was ridiculed by the gay triflers he relinquished. Harrington, to compose his Oceana, severed himself from the society of his friends, and was so wrapped in abstraction, that he was pitied as a lunatic. Descartes, inflamed by genius, abruptly breaks off all his friendly connexions, hires an obscure house in an unfrequented corner at Paris, and applies himself to study during two years unknown to his acquaintance. Adam Smith, after the publication of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... sound knowledge of Physics, and to imbue the minds of our students with correct dynamical principles, have been long regarded as among our highest functions, and very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies. Indeed the cultivation and diffusion of sound dynamical ideas has already effected a great change in the language and thoughts even of those who make no pretensions to science, ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... too indolently. It appears thus the blood brother of the adrenal cortex which also influences the skin pigment and so susceptibility of the organism to light, brain growth and sex ripening. It is interesting that Descartes, in 1628, considered the pineal the ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... completed yet. If we go back to the opening of the seventeenth century we find three men whose business it was, above all, to present and defend common sense in the natural sciences. The most eloquent and variedly persuasive of these was Lord Bacon. Then there was the young Descartes trying to shake himself loose from his training in a Jesuit seminary by going into the Thirty Years' War, and starting his intellectual life all over by giving up for the moment all he had been taught. Galileo had committed an offense of a grave character by discussing in the mother tongue ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... which we are concerned, the seventeenth century centres round Descartes, whom an English admirer described as "the grand secretary of Nature." [Footnote: Joseph Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatising, p. 211, 64] Though his brilliant mathematical discoveries were the sole permanent contribution he made ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Robert Burns a ploughman, Keats a druggist, Thomas Carlyle a mason, Hugh Miller a stone mason. Rubens, the artist, was a page, Swedenborg, a mining engineer. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Ben Johnson was a brick layer and worked at building Lincoln Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket. Jeremy Taylor was a barber. Andrew Johnson was a tailor. Cardinal Wolsey was a butcher's son. So were Defoe and Kirke ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... to measure such an inconceivable velocity as that claimed for light, by any means or appliances which may be devised by human ingenuity, must be regarded as futile. DESCARTES says: "Light reaches us instantaneously from the sun, and would do so, even if the intervening distance were greater than that between ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... anticipating the inevitable result of the adoption of some of Mill's proposed social reforms, I could not avoid recalling that wise dictum of Frederick the Great concerning philosophers—a saying which Buckle quotes so triumphantly against Plato, Aristotle, Descartes—even Bacon, Newton, and a long list of names illustrious in the annals of English literature. Frederick declared: 'If I wanted to ruin one of my provinces I would make over its government to the philosopher.' With due deference to Buckle's superior learning ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... those who would measure man's large scope by the gauge of their own ability and experience fall into such idiosyncrasy as is the fruitful mother of sects, abortive social schemes, and all the various brood of dwarfed life; but, for most men, the pressure of life itself, which compels them, like Descartes, doubting the world, to live as if it were real, corrects their original method of independence. They find that to use authority is the better part of wisdom, much as to employ men belongs to practical statecraft; and ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... before it; that it did this good work by boldly observing and analysing facts; that this boldness towards facts increased in proportion as Europe became indoctrinated with the Jewish literature; and that, notably, such men as Kepler, Newton, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, in whatsoever else they differed, agreed in this, that their attitude towards Nature was derived from the teaching of the Jewish sages. I believe that we are not yet fully aware how much we owe to the Jewish mind, in the ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... Descartes 57 n.; his universal doubt antecedent to study if strictly taken is incurable, since even from an indubitable first principle no advance can be made except by the faculties which we doubt, 116; his appeal to the veracity of God is useless, 120 (v. ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... the example (if I remember rightly) of two dogs, the one a house-dog and the other a hunting-dog. For by long training it could be brought about, that the house-dog should become accustomed to hunt, and the hunting-dog to cease from running after hares. To this opinion Descartes not a little inclines. For he maintained, that the soul or mind is specially united to a particular part of the brain, namely, to that part called the pineal gland, by the aid of which the mind is enabled to feel all the movements which are set going ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... Celeste d'avoir le courage d'agrandir sa Geographie Physique. Je suis sur que le grand homme que nous aimons le plus, vous et moi, Sir John Herschel, serait de mon opinion. Le MONDE, je me sers du titre que Descartes voulait donner a un livre dont nous n'avons que de pauvres fragmens; le Monde doit etre ecrit pour les Anglais par un auteur de race pure. Il n'y a pas de seve, pas de vitalite dans les traductions les mieux faites. Ma sante s'est conserve ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... have from the sense of touch are "vicarious," as though our friends felt the sun for us! They deny a priori what they have not seen and I have felt. Some brave doubters have gone so far even as to deny my existence. In order, therefore, that I may know that I exist, I resort to Descartes's method: "I think, therefore I am." Thus I am metaphysically established, and I throw upon the doubters the burden of proving my non-existence. When we consider how little has been found out about the mind, is it not amazing that any one should ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... creature and thinking being, as I suppose, and verily believe you are, it must be unnecessary, and to a certain degree injurious. If I did not know by experience, that some men pass their whole time in doing nothing, I should not think it possible for any being, superior to Monsieur Descartes' automatons, to squander away, in absolute idleness, one single minute of that small portion of time which is allotted ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... us not seem to suffer either! Out with your cards, pipes, and dice. . . (All begin spreading out the games on the drums, the stools, the ground, and on their cloaks, and light long pipes): And I shall read Descartes. ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... century, and especially of French materialism, was not only a struggle against the existing political institutions and against the existing religion and theology, but equally an open and outspoken campaign against all metaphysics, especially that of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibnitz. Metaphysics was confronted with philosophy, just as Feuerbach, in his first decisive stand against Hegel, opposed sober philosophy to drunken speculation. The metaphysics of the seventeenth century, which was driven from the field by the French Enlightenment, ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... Barolo and Silvio Pellico. Isabel Fenwick and Wordsworth. Harriet Martineau and Channing. Lucy Aikin and Channing. Frances Power Cobbe and Theodore Parker. Friendships of Women and their Tutors. Zenobia and Longinus. Countess of Pembroke and Daniel. Princess Elizabeth and Descartes. Caroline of Brunswick and Leibnitz. Lady Jane Grey and Elmer. Elizabeth Robinson and Middleton. Hester Salusbury and Dr. Collier. Blanche of Lancaster and Chaucer. Venetia Digby and Ben Jonson. Countess of Bedford and Ben Jonson. Countess Ranelagh and Milton. Duchess of Queensbury and Gay. ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... manners and social life of the princes at the German Diets, a picture from the XVIth Century, the sequel of a memoir by Guhrauer on Elizabeth, Abbess of Herford, a friend of William Penn, and a correspondent of Malebranche, Leibnitz and Descartes, &c., &c. &c. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... which he regarded as the arrangement of fine words, without any useful meaning or adherence to truth; but that, when truth and science were united to these fine words, he liked poetry very well; and next morning, after breakfast, he made me read as much of another chapter on Descartes, etc., as the time would allow, as I had ordered my carriage at twelve. I read, talked, asked questions, and looked at books and instruments, till near one, when I set off ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... ancient nations; and infers future and periodical convulsions. Hesper, in answer, exhibits the great distinction between the ancient and modern state of the arts and of society. Crusades. Commerce. Hanseatic League. Copernicus. Kepler. Newton, Galileo. Herschel. Descartes. Bacon. Printing Press. Magnetic Needle. Geographical discoveries. Federal system in America. A similar system to be extended over the whole earth. Columbus desires ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... employed about philosophy when you shut yourself up in your own individual thoughts. A mistake! The most powerful genius of modern times failed in this enterprise. Descartes conceived the project of forgetting all that he had known, and of producing a system of doctrine which should come forth from his brain as Minerva sprang all armed from the brain of Jupiter. Now-a-days a mere schoolboy, if he has been ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... treatises of Maimonides and Crescas. His thought became sceptical, and though he was "intoxicated with a sense of God," he had no love for any positive religion. He learned Latin, and found new avenues opened to him in the writings of Descartes. His associations with the representatives of the Cartesian philosophy and his own indifference to ceremonial observances brought him into collision with the Synagogue, and, in 1656, during the absence ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... his frame of mind: he was going to persist in his study of the Latin language, and his new name stood for peace or blessing, just as the other had, being essentially the same as our word benediction. The man's purpose was firm. To perfect himself in Latin, he began a study of Descartes' "Meditations," and this led to proving the Cartesian philosophy by a geometrical formula. In his quiet home among the simple Mennonites, five miles from Amsterdam, there gradually grew up around him a body of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... Descartes' ancient philosophy. A huge tome, full of quaint pictures of gods and goddesses, and angels and devils, on which we were never tired or gazing; infinitely preferring the latter, with their curious tails and horns, to the former; whom we called, ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... of artesian wells, I fancy," he said in his kindly voice; and he began to give her a brief outline of Descartes' philosophy, which it is to be feared she did not at all appreciate. She was not sorry when Erica appealed to him for some disputed fact, in which they all seemed most extraordinarily interested, ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... regulated literary opinion in Paris. For half a century past Frenchmen had been regarding with jealous attention the causes and effects of human passion, culminating, for the moment, in the treatise written by Descartes for the daughter of the Queen of Bohemia. The Jansenists and the Jesuits, the playwrights, the novelists, Hobbes and Spinoza, all pursued, along widely different paths, those illusive secrets of the human heart which had escaped the notice of earlier generations. ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... cried; "why that is the ontological argument of St. Anselm, adopted afterwards by a soldier philosopher like yourself, called Descartes. There's nothing new under the sun. It is wonderful how modern artists can refurbish our old Masters and make wonderful pictures ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... present volume, Humboldt gives an historical review of the attempts to reduce the phenomena of the universe to a grand central unity, including the labors of Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Giordano Bruno, Descartes, and Sir Isaac Newton. The problem, as he conclusively shows, still remains to be solved. The present imperfect state of physical science offers insuperable obstacles to a speedy solution. New substances and new forces are constantly brought to light, nor can ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... appropriating Vieta's rights, but they even describe the distinguished English mathematician as working on the ' Cartesian Method.' While the truth appears to be that Hariot's method in Algebra, though not published for more than thirty years after its invention, must date from a time when Descartes ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... I omit to mention the great atomic system taught by old Moschus before the siege of Troy; revived by Democritus of laughing memory; improved by Epicurus, that king of good fellows; and modernized by the fanciful Descartes. But I decline inquiring, whether the atoms, of which the earth is said to be composed, are eternal or recent; whether they are animate or inanimate; whether, agreeably, to the opinion of Atheists, they were fortuitously aggregated, or, as the Theists maintain, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... arrive at the Pantheon until ten o'clock at night, for the day had not been sufficiently long for this triumph. The coffin of Voltaire was deposited between those of Descartes and Mirabeau,—the spot predestined for this intermediary genius between philosophy and policy, between the design and the execution. This apotheosis of modern philosophy, amidst the great events that agitated the ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... in those early days; at the first editions, with their inscriptions in the author's handwriting, or in Maria's pretty caligraphy. There was the PIRATE in its original volumes, and Mackintosh's MEMOIRS, and Mrs. Barbauld's ESSAYS, and Descartes's ESSAYS, that Arthur Hallam liked to read; Hallam's CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY, and Rogers's POEMS, were there all inscribed and dedicated. Not less interesting were the piles of Magazines that had been sent from America. I never knew before how many Magazines ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... Colleges of Paris. The case, very similar to that of Angelique Cottin, occurred in the month of December previous, in the person of a young girl, not quite fourteen years old, apprenticed to a colorist, in the Rue Descartes. The occurrences were quite as marked as those in the Cottin case. The professor, seated one day near the girl, was raised from the floor, along with the chair on which he sat. There were occasional knockings. The phenomena ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... have been used, both in ancient and modern times, in order to avoid an engagement with the ministers of the gods, who have ever been the tyrants of thought? How many hypotheses and shifts were such men as Descartes, Mallebranche, and Leibnitz, forced to invent, in order to reconcile their discoveries with the fables and mistakes which Religion had consecrated! In what guarded phrases have the greatest philosophers expressed themselves, even at the risk of being absurd, inconsistent, or unintelligible, ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... ordinary theological arguments. But to influence such a mind as Byron's more was required. In the search after truth, he looked for hard logic, and eloquence was not required by him. Fenelon could not have persuaded him; but Descartes might have influenced him. He preferred, in fact, in such arguments, the method of the geometrician to that of the artist; the one uses truth to arrive at truth, the other makes use of the beautiful only, to arrive at the ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... busy with my distillations and analyses. Often I forgot my meals, and when old Madge summoned me to my tea I found my dinner lying untouched upon the table. At night I read Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant—all those who have pried into what is unknowable. They are all fruitless and empty, barren of result, but prodigal of polysyllables, reminding me of men who, while digging for gold, have turned up many worms, and then exhibit them exultantly as being what they sought. ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... unification of all knowledge into an articulate system, was more ambitious than anything attempted since St. Thomas or Descartes. Most thinkers have confined themselves either to generalities or to details, but Spencer addressed himself to everything. He dealt in logical, metaphysical, and ethical first principles, in cosmogony and geology, in physics, and chemistry ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... Instruments Rectilineal Propagation of Light Law of Incidence and Reflection Sterility of the Middle Ages Refraction Discovery of Snell Partial and Total Reflection Velocity of Light Roemer, Bradley, Foucault, and Fizeau Principle of Least Action Descartes and the Rainbow Newton's Experiments on the Composition of Solar Light His Mistake regarding Achromatism Synthesis of White Light Yellow and Blue Lights produce White by their Mixture Colours of Natural Bodies Absorption ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... liberate the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to the reason, has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as yet by any means accomplished. On the one side, Descartes and Bacon and Spinoza and Locke are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the Renaissance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. The whole movement of the Reformation is a phase in that accelerated ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... inquiry. Where are we to find such a principle, except in the very action of thought; I mean, this time, its action of profound life independent of all practical aim? We shall thus only be imitating the example of Descartes when solving the problem of temporary doubt. What we shall term return to the immediate, the primitive, the pure fact, will be the taking of each perception considered as an act lived, a coloured moment of the Cogito, and this will be for us ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... Rethel, was the son of a serge weaver; brought up in the country, he nevertheless pursued his studies and succeeded to the priesthood. At the seminary, where he lived with much regularity, he devoted himself to the system of Descartes. ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... Stukely, a parson, has accounted for it, and I think prettily, by electricity—but that is the fashionable cause, and every thing is resolved into electrical appearances, as formerly every thing was accounted for by Descartes's vortices, and Sir Isaac's gravitation. But they all take care, after accounting for the earthquake systematically, to assure you that still it was nothing less than a judgment. Dr. Barton, the rector of St. Andrews, was the only sensible, or at least honest ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... this conception of human knowledge. He avows that it has been virtually acted on from the earliest period by all who have made any real contribution to science, and became distinctly present to the minds of speculative men from the time of Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo, whom he regards as collectively the founders of the Positive Philosophy. As he says, the knowledge which mankind, even in the earliest ages, chiefly pursued, being that which they most needed, was foreknowledge: "savoir, pour ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... seem also to be in part reflections of the past, and it is difficult to separate in them what is original and what is borrowed. Doubtless they have a relation to one another—the transition from Descartes to Spinoza or from Locke to Berkeley is not a matter of chance, but it can hardly be described as an alternation of opposites or figured to the mind by the vibrations of a pendulum. Even in Aristotle and Plato, rightly understood, we cannot trace this law of action and reaction. ...
— Sophist • Plato
... other countries. Vattel, the author of the 'Rights of Nations,' was a practical diplomatist, and a first-rate man of business. Rabelais was a physician, and a successful practitioner; Schiller was a surgeon; Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon, Camoens, Descartes, Maupertius, La Rochefoucauld, Lacepede, Lamark, were soldiers in the early part ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... well prove the last of all such syntheses carried out by a single mind. Specialism and criticism have gained the upper hand, and the fresh turn to harmony, which we shall notice later on, is rather a harmony of spirit than an encyclopaedic unity such as the great masters of system from Descartes to Comte and Spencer had ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... newspapers, and financial enterprise. They desire to know and love the best that is known, and they are willing to be poor and obscure, if they may but gain entrance into this higher world. "I shall ever consider myself," says Descartes, "more obliged to those who leave me to my leisure, than I should to any who might offer me the most honorable employments." This is the thought of every true student and lover of wisdom; for he feels that whatever a man's occupation may be, his business is to improve his mind and ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... of the villages on the way, dwelt in 1650-51 Benedict Spinoza, the philosopher, and there he wrote his abridgement of the Meditations of Descartes, his master in philosophy, who had for a while lived close by at Endegeest. Spinoza, who was born at Amsterdam in 1632, died in 1677. His house at Rynsburg, which he shared with a Colleginat (one of a sect of Remonstrants who had ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... superstitious zealot of the darkest age. Philanthropy had brought with it crimes as horrible as the massacre of Saint Bartholomew. This was the emancipation of the human mind. These were the fruits of the great victory of reason over prejudice. France had rejected the faith of Pascal and Descartes as a nursery fable, that a courtezan might be her idol, and a madman her priest. She had asserted her freedom against Louis, that she might bow down before Robespierre. For a time men thought that ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to the conception here formed of it, has no concern with the nature of the act of judging or believing; the consideration of that act, as a phenomenon of the mind, belongs to another science. Philosophers, however, from Descartes downward, and especially from the era of Leibnitz and Locke, have by no means observed this distinction; and would have treated with great disrespect any attempt to analyze the import of Propositions, unless founded on an analysis of the act of Judgment. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... of the Victory over Galileo. Rejoicings of churchmen over the victory The silencing of Descartes Persecution of Campanella and of Kepler Persistence and victory of science Dilemma of the theologians Vain attempts ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the breadth and the scope which she sensed more or less vaguely in The Evolution of Sociology. Holman Sommers quoted freely, and discussed boldly and frankly, such abstruse authors as Descartes, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Comte, Gumplowicz, some of them names she had never heard of and could not even spell without following her copy letter by letter. Holman Sommers seemed to have read all of them and to have weighed all of them and to ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... mathematical professor of Leyden, introduced the true method of measuring the degrees of longitude and latitude, and Huygens, who had seen his manuscripts, asserted that Snellius had invented, before Descartes, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... nothing I do not question,—said the Master;—I not only begin with the precept of Descartes, but I hold all my opinions involving any chain of reasoning ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... an expedition to some venerated place to which a vivid memory of sacred things experienced, or a long and wonderful history of human experience in divine matters, or a personal attraction affecting the soul impels one. This is, I say, its essence. So a pilgrimage may be made to the tomb of Descartes, in Paris, or it may be a little walk uphill to a neighbouring and beloved grave, or a modern travel, even in luxury, on the impulse to see something that ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... Leiden to Katwyk-aan-Zee passes the houses of Descartes and Spinoza; and altogether the short journey by water did not lack interest, for Katwyk has become a colony of artists. Once there, we walked to the sluice where the Rhine seeks its grave in the North Sea; and as it happened that the tide was high, with a strong shore ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... and his Royalist principles, expounded in his treatise, De Corpore Politico, led to his again, in 1641, leaving England and going to Paris, where he remained until 1652. While there, he entered into controversy on mathematical subjects with Descartes, pub. some of his principal works, including Leviathan, and received, in 1647, the appointment of mathematical tutor to the Prince of Wales, afterwards Charles II., who was then in that city. The views expressed in his works, however, brought him ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Of bridging the chasm between the crystal and the non-nucleated cell? I do not. As I sat alone last night unable to sleep, my eyes ran over the backs of the books on my shelves—they were all there, all the great ones, Laplace, Spinoza, Descartes, Goethe, Spencer, Hegel, Kant, Darwin, all the wonder-workers. How masterful each had been in his time. How complacent of praise; how critical of the past! But here now they all stood gathering dust, and I thought: so will the unborn philosophers of the next ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... which a given state finds itself at a given time? It seems too easy a solution of our problems to seek dogmatic answers to our questionings by having recourse to the "natural light," that ready oracle of the philosopher, Descartes. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... language. This individualism has had the freest play, and we are not likely to lose all that it has given us. Yet as soon as it was achieved the more distinguished spirits in every country began to feel the need of counterbalancing it. The history of the movement may be said to begin with Descartes, who in 1629 wrote to his friend Mersenne that it would be possible to construct an artificial language which could be used as an international medium of communication. Leibnitz, though he had solved the question for himself, writing some of his works in Latin and ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... long, long wakeful nights have been all lost to me. The subject of my meditations has been the relations of thoughts to things—in the language of Hume, of ideas to impressions. I may be truly described in the words of Descartes: I have been "res cogitans, id est, dubitans, affirmans, negans, pauca intelligens, multa ignorans, volens, nolens, imaginans etiam, et sentiens." I please myself with believing that you will receive no small ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... proceeds to state and to criticize some of the mischievous ideas which arise from Parallelism. There is the idea of a brain-soul, of a spot where the soul lives or where the brain thinks—which we have not quite abandoned since Descartes named the pineal gland as the seat of the soul. Then there is the false idea that all causality is mechanistic and that there is nothing in the universe which is not mathematically calculable. There is the confusion of representations and of things. There is the false notion that we may argue ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... discovered the folly of that study by erecting a figure with the aid of one or two of the problems in Euclid. The propositions contained in Euclid he regarded as self-evident; and, without any preliminary study, he made himself master of Descartes' "Geometry" by his genius and patient application. Dr. Wallis's "Arithmetic of Infinites," Sanderson's "Logic," and the "Optics" of Kepler, were among the books which he studied with care; and he is reported to have found himself more deeply versed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... separates the work of Cervantes from that of Moliere, is not sufficient to explain this modernity. Between the Spain of Quixote and the France of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, lies something deeper than time. Descartes and Gassendi had lived in France, while, on the other hand, the seed of Saint Ignatius Loyola lay germinating in the ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... equal care on both sides of a question.—W. S. LANDOR in HOLYOAKE'S Agitator's Life, ii. 315. Introduire dans l'histoire, et sans tenir compte des passions politiques et religieuses, le doute methodique que Descartes, le premier, appliqua a l'etude de la philosophie, n'est-ce pas la une excellente methode? n'est-ce pas meme la meilleure?—CHANTELAUZE, Correspondant, 1883, i. 129. La critique historique ne sera jamais populaire. Comme elle est de toutes ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... Henry the Second's castle, and its three bridges. The fine central one, of fifteen arches and a quarter of a mile long, is a prolongation of the Rue Nationale, and has near it statues of Rabelais and Descartes. ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... reason or intelligence, and who has for years publicly denied the observations of other men which tend to disprove his ancient theory. It seems hardly worth while to argue about either wolves or men with such a naturalist, or to point out that Descartes' idea of animals, as purely mechanical or automatic creatures, has long since been laid aside and was never considered seriously by any man who had lived close to either wild or domestic animals. The second critic's knowledge of ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... MORE's and DESCARTES' (1596-1650) theories as to the nature of spirit is interesting. When MORE first read DESCARTES' works he was favourably impressed with his views, though without entirely agreeing with him on all points; but later the difference became accentuated. DESCARTES ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... possible, and even necessary, to present them thus in an unbroken line, because the insular movement in ethical philosophy has been hardly, if at all, affected by anything done abroad. In the earlier part of the modern period, little of any kind was done in ethics by the great continental thinkers. Descartes has only a few allusions to the subject; the 'Ethica' of Spinoza is chiefly a work of speculative philosophy; Leibnitz has no systematic treatment of moral questions. The case is very different; in the new German philosophy since the time of Kant; besides Kant himself, Fichte, Hegel, Schleiermacher, ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... are the last persons to think of their own historic position, else we might have expected to find him musing on the saving shelter which this land of freedom and tolerance had given to more than one of his great precursors in the literature of emancipation. Descartes had found twenty years of priceless freedom (1629-1649) among the Dutch burghers. The ruling ideas of the Encyclopaedia came in direct line from Bayle (d. 1706) and Locke (d. 1704), and both Bayle and Locke, though in different measures, owed their security to the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... when her husband gave lectures on the philosophy of Descartes, used to seat herself on these days at the door, and refused admittance to every one shabbily dressed, or who did not discover a genteel air. So convinced was she that, to be worthy of hearing the lectures ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... unquiet and skittish Cornelius | Agrippa. The titanic bearing of the | Renaissance magus is now supplanted | by a classical composure similar to | that of the "conversations" of the | earliest Humanists. Also in Galileo's | DIALOGO and in Descartes's RECHERCHE | DE LA VERIT we find the same | familiar tone and style of | conversation in which [Descartes | wrote] "several friends, frankly and | without ceremony, disclose the best | of their thoughts to each other." But | there is besides, in Bacon, ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon |
