"Descartes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 personal and social life, at least north of the Alps, the majority of such men ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... 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 for ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... J. S. Mill called 'intuitions.' To confute intuitionists and get rid of intuitions was one main purpose of all Mill's speculations. What, then, is an 'intuition'? To explain that fully it would be necessary to write once more that history of the philosophical movement from Descartes to Hume, which has been summarised and elucidated by so many writers that it should be as plain as the road from St. Paul's to Temple Bar. I am forced to glance at the position taken by Reid and Stewart because it has a most important ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... than [fix them on settled, determined] ideas of things; I say these general maxims will serve to confirm us in mistakes; and in such a way of use of words, which is most common, will serve to prove contradictions: v.g. he that with Descartes shall frame in his mind an idea of what he calls body to be nothing but extension, may easily demonstrate that there is no vacuum, i.e. no space void of body, by this maxim, WHAT IS, IS. For the idea to which he annexes the name body, being bare extension, his knowledge that space cannot be without ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... 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 of their ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... inventor of the steam-engine, and call himself simply its improver; though, in my mind, to doubt his right to that honor would be as inaccurate as to question Sir Isaac Newton's claim to his greatest discoveries, because Descartes in mathematics, and Galileo in astronomy and mechanics, had preceded him; or to deny the merits of his illustrious successor, because galvanism was not his discovery, though before his time it had remained as useless to science as the instrument ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... the following bulky matters: Geometry, the Solar Spectrum, the Habeas Corpus Act, the British Parliament, and in Metaphysics they were asked to trace the progress of skepticism from Descartes to Hume. It is within bounds to say that some of the results were astonishing. Without doubt, there were students present who justified their teacher's wisdom in introducing them to these studies; but the fact is also evident that others had been ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that the principle of the scientific Naturalism of the latter half of the nineteenth century, in which the intellectual movement of the Renascence has culminated, and which was first clearly formulated by Descartes, leads not to the denial of the existence of any Supernature;[12] but simply to the denial of the validity of the evidence adduced in favour of this, or of that, extant form ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... set bounds to 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 hug a ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... subsequent letter of Hartlib's, dated Nov. 29, 1659, it appears that Oldenburg and Jones were both much interested in the optical instruments of a certain Bressieux, then in Paris, who had for two years been chief workman in that line for Descartes. They were anxious to make him a present of some good glass from London, because he was rather secretive about his workmanship, and such a present would go a great way towards ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... 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 views ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... 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, which he retained until he was deemed politically ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... understand him, and the followers of 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 ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... 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. The laurels Hobbes won in the schools ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the free spirit of the humanists as the supreme heresy of free thought. He said that philosophy was only the shadow and revelation the substance. "Nor is it reasonable," said he, "that the divine will should be made the subject of controversy with us." Zwingli, anticipating Descartes's "finitum infiniti capax non est," stated that our small minds could not grasp God's plan. Oecolampadius, dying, said that he wanted no more light than he then had—an instructive contrast to Goethe's last words: "Mehr Licht!" Even Bacon, either from prudence or conviction, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... only apparent: evolution not revolution the rule in Physical Theory— Revival of metaphysical speculation and influence of Descartes: all phenomena reduced to matter and movement— Modern physicists challenge this: physical, unlike mechanical, phenomena seldom reversible—Two schools, one considering experimental laws imperative, the other merely studying relations of magnitudes: both teach something ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... 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
... question then 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, and that of the ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... imagine, in 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 ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... owe to Shakespeare and Milton, to Byron and Shelley and Scott, to Lister and Newton, answers the German! Who can go to war with the countrymen of Racine and Moliere and Pascal and Montesquieu and Descartes? repeats the friend of France; and by others are trumpeted the fraternal relations that we ought to cultivate with the countrymen of Dante, or of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. This is phantom friendship, and we all know in our heart of hearts, that we would fight any ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... aristocratic instinct discerned plenty of difficulties of another kind, and he took alarm. A fine manner is not the invariable outcome of noble feeling; and while no man at court had a nobler air than Racine, Corneille looked very much like a cattle-dealer, and Descartes might have been taken for an honest Dutch merchant; and visitors to La Brede, meeting Montesquieu in a cotton nightcap, carrying a rake over his shoulder, mistook him for a gardener. A knowledge of the world, when it is not sucked in with mother's milk and part of the inheritance ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... 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 ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... had been a bad man. At any rate, he was wrong; and the commonest knowledge of our wild world suffices to show any reasoning man the gravity of the error propounded in my quotation. As we study the history of the frivolous race of men, it sometimes seems hard to disbelieve the theory of Descartes. The great Frenchman held that man and other animals are automata; and, were it not that such a theory strikes at the root of morals, we might almost be tempted to accept it in moments of weakness, when the riddle of the unintelligible earth weighs ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... in the actual condition in 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
... 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 ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... "Men of Genius," quite a list—Corneille, Descartes, Virgil, Addison, La Fontaine, Dryden, Manzoni, and Newton—of those who could not express themselves in public. Whatever part self-consciousness played in the individual case, we must class the peculiarity among the defects, not signs, of genius. ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... 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 doctrine ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... said Devereux, "the only proof of existence which Descartes would admit—I think, therefore ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... 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, 'Fat lazy-looking children ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... at least, at this distance, who can only judge him from partial and imperfect knowledge, often seems to fall far short of what a man should be. He was not one of the high-minded and proud searchers after knowledge and truth, like Descartes, who were content to accept a frugal independence so that their time and their thoughts might be their own. Bacon was a man of the world, and wished to live in and with the world. He threatened sometimes retirement, but never with any very serious ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... to account for it either by the action of certain vortices, as Kepler and Descartes, or by some other principle of impulse or attraction, for it is most certain that these effects must proceed from the action of some force or other. This we will call by the general name of a centripetal force, as it is a force which is directed to some centre; ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... discriminate power from form, essence from accident, and opening by its terminology and definition, high roads into nature, had trained a race of athletic philosophers. Harvey had shown the circulation of the blood; Gilbert had shown that the earth was a magnet; Descartes, taught by Gilbert's magnet, with its vortex, spiral, and polarity, had filled Europe with the leading thought of vortical motion, as the secret of nature. Newton, in the year in which Swedenborg was born, published the "Principia," and established the universal ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 30 miles in diameter, situated N.W. of Abulfeda, is bounded by ill-defined, broken, and comparatively low walls; interrupted on the S.E. by a fine crater, Descartes A, and on the S.W. by another, smaller. There is also a brilliant crater outside on the N.W. Schmidt shows a crater-row on the floor, which I have ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... "doubt the existence of many both dark and bright. Go, then, out of this haunted place where a human madness broke through the Barrier. Be satisfied with the victories you have had. Let the visits of the Dark One fade into mere nightmare; and know I am no more a living woman than Franchina Descartes." ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... varying becomes a mark of a corresponding general truth respecting the accompanying variations in quality; and as the science of quantity is, so far as a science can be, quite deductive, the theory of that special kind of qualities becomes so likewise. It was thus that Descartes and Clairaut made geometry, which was already partially deductive, still more so, by pointing out the correspondence ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... vraisemblance and decorum—psychological analysis tinged with cynicism rather than idealism; gallantry but against the background sometimes of the modern city; a plainer style; and only such matters as seemed to this student of Descartes and Locke to be entirely reasonable. Fielding's chapter in Tom Jones (IX, i) "Of Those Who Lawfully May, and of Those Who May Not, Write Such Histories as This" could be taken as an indication that he knew not only what ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... yourself, inevitably, by the fact of your destiny, a writer, an author; you will be a philosopher; you will be one of the lights of the century, and your name will occupy a place in the annals of the nineteenth century, like those of Gassendi, Descartes, Malebranche, and Bacon in the seventeenth, and those of Diderot, Montesquieu, Helvetius. Locke, Hume, and Holbach in the eighteenth. Such will be your lot! Do now what you will, set type in a printing-office, bring up children, bury yourself in deep seclusion, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... 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. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 the ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... 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)
... Mirabeau, and a crater under the feet of Robespierre; its books, its theatre, its art, its science, its literature, its philosophy, are the manuals of the human race; it has Pascal, Regnier, Corneille, Descartes, Jean-Jacques: Voltaire for all moments, Moliere for all centuries; it makes its language to be talked by the universal mouth, and that language becomes the word; it constructs in all minds the idea of progress, the liberating dogmas which it forges are for the generations trusty friends, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... 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 a view ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... disciples of Descartes were egoists, the ego being the basis of their philosophy." Egoism is the name of their system. Egoism is sometimes used also in the sense of undue admiration of self, the outward expression of which is egotism. But "egotism, in the sense of 'self-worship,' is preferable ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... a new light was struck by Harriott and Descartes, with their contemporaries, or immediate predecessors, and the restoration of ancient geometry, aided by the modern invention of algebra, placed the science of mechanism on the philosophic throne. How widely this domination spread, and how long ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... from false conceptions, to 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 Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... "all this I steadfastly believe," even by deputy, I know you will have no hesitation in saying so, and in giving me as frank a refusal as my request. [As against his dislike of consenting to a rite, to him meaningless, he was moved by a feeling which in part corresponded to Descartes' morale par provision,—in part was an acknowledgment of the possibilities of individual development, making it only fair to a child to give it a connection with the official spiritual organisation of its country, which it could either ignore or ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... a small volume devoted to an account of his labors recently published by M. Georges Dary. M. Trouve, who may be said to have had no ancestors from an electric point of view, was born in 1839 in the little village of Haye-Descartes. He was sent by his parents to the College of Chinon, whence he entered the Ecole des Arts et Metiers, and afterward went to Paris to work in the shop of a clock-maker. This was an excellent apprenticeship ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... haughty demeanor in the presence of those who were unwilling to do her bidding. Before leaving Sweden, Christine had tried to gather a circle of learned men about her at Stockholm, and the great French philosopher Descartes spent some months in her palace. Later, when in Paris, on her way to Italy, a special session of the French Academy had been held in her honor, and all of the literary men of France went out to the palace at Fontainebleau ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... 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 ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... the sunset, he swept the horizon with his hand. "I have the all-round look. I say the Man of Calvary, He is before all, the sun; but I say Socrates, Plato, Jean Jacques—that is my name, and it is not for nothing, that—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Descartes, Locke, they are stars that go round the sun. It is the same light, but not the same sound. I reconcile. In me all comes together like the spokes to the hub of a wheel. Me—I am a Christian, I am philosophe, also. In St. Saviour's, my home in Quebec, if the crops are good, what do men say? 'C'est ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... did not remain altogether negative. The new movement extended itself to Metaphysics, and under the leadership of Descartes a resolute effort was made to reform Philosophy ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... were called the principles of agriculture, he found them involved in obscurity; he went to the book of Nature for instruction, and commenced, like Descartes, with doubting everything. He condemns the Roman husbandry as fettered by superstitions, and gives a piquant sneer at the absurd rhetoric and verbosity of Varro.[G] Nor is he any more tolerant of Scotch superstitions. He declares ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... taught Spinoza the rudiments of the language that was to enable him to enter into the important current of modern ideas especially embodied in the philosophy of Descartes. Francis Van den Ende gave him a thorough technical, not literary, mastery of it. And Van den Ende taught Spinoza much more besides. He acquainted him with the literature of antiquity; he gave him a sound knowledge of the contemporary fundamentals of physiology and physics; and it was he possibly, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... of Locke was in the ascendant, more spiritual forms of philosophy fell into disrepute. Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz were considered almost obsolete; More and Cudworth were out of favour: and there was but scanty tolerance for any writer who could possibly incur the charge of transcendentalism or mysticism. It is not that Cartesian or Platonic, or even mystic ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... 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 ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... French to the core. No part of his admirable country is more characteristically national. Normandy is Normandy, Burgundy is Burgundy, Provence is Pro- vence; 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 charm- ing passage about the mildness, the convenient quality, of the physical conditions of central France, - "son climat souple ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... questioning, but as my response was not satisfactory, she promptly hid herself under the bed, and from that refuge she could not be induced to stir during the whole of the day. People who are not accustomed to live with animals, and who, like Descartes, regard them as mere machines, will think that I lend unauthorized meanings to the acts of the 'volatile' and the 'quadruped,' but I have only faithfully translated their ideas into human language. The next ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... its 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 ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... book-learning. Every student has heard Sydenham's reply to Sir Richard Blackmore's question as to what books he should read,—meaning medical books. "Read Don Quixote," was his famous answer. But Sydenham himself made medical books and may be presumed to have thought those at least worth reading. Descartes was asked where was his library, and in reply held up the dissected body of an animal. But Descartes made books, great books, and a great many of them. A physician of common sense without erudition is ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sings his noble lays, The hero goes through dangers; The brave man duty's call obeys, And did so, even in the days When sages yet were strangers— But heart and genius now have taught What Locke and what Descartes never thought; By them immediately is shown That which is ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... The spacious amphitheatre of the Sorbonne was filled with a representative audience, numbering probably three thousand people. Around the hall, were statues of the great masters of French intellectual life—Pascal, Descartes, Lavoisier, and others. On the wall was one of the Puvis de Chavannes's most beautiful mural paintings. The group of university officials and academicians on the dais, from which Mr. Roosevelt spoke, lent to the occasion an appropriate ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... decorated 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 address, in the woman who wielded it. ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... though Democritus Platonissans explores an astronomical subject, just as the third part of Psychathanasia also does, its attitude and theme are quite different; for More had meanwhile been reading Descartes. ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... I was 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 ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... system of purely scientific thought in language which is a model of clear and vigorous English style. At the same time, in France, a man of far greater scientific capacity than either Bacon or Hobbes, Rene Descartes, not only in his immortal 'Discours de la Methode' and elsewhere, went down to the foundations of scientific certainty, but, in his 'Principes de Philosophie,' indicated where the goal of physical science really lay. However, Descartes was an eminent mathematician, ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... harmony with the impressive dignity of the theme. In the Introduction to the 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 ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... indicative of the catholicity of his tastes I may mention that, going over his papers after his death, I discovered in the same drawer a manuscript appreciation of Wagner, "Football Hints," memoranda on "Pascal and Descartes on Method," and the outline of an essay on "The ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... standpoint from which we must view the heroes of Corneille, if we would understand those extraordinary souls which, always at the highest degree of tension, deny themselves, as a weakness, everything that resembles tenderness or pity. Again, thus and thus alone can we explain how Descartes, and with him all the philosophers of his century, ran counter to all common sense, and refused to recognise that animals might possess a soul-like principle which, however remotely, might link ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... 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
... tokened 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... The philosophy 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 ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... the 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
... trade of a mason, worked on Lincoln's Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket. Joseph Hunter was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a druggist, Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Andrew Johnson was a tailor. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the son of a blacksmith, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... a natural mistake for the student of seventeenth-century thought to underestimate the tenacity of scholastic Aristotelianism. Descartes, we all know, was reared in it, but then Descartes overthrew it; and he had done his work and died by the time that Leibniz was of an age to philosophize at all. We expect to see Leibniz starting on his shoulders and climbing on from there. We are disappointed. Leibniz himself tells ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... thought of as inherent in the projectile itself, and that the retardation or ultimate cessation of that motion is due to the action of antagonistic forces. In other words, he had come to grasp the meaning of the first law of motion. It remained, however, for the great Frenchman Descartes to give precise expression to this law two years after Galileo's death. As Descartes expressed it in his Principia Philosophiae, published in 1644, any body once in motion tends to go on in a straight line, at a ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... no known function, so Descartes declared it to be the seat of the soul. 'There is nothing in here. Let us put something in,' and he put in the idea of the soul. That was the ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... originality for 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: ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... circumstance which reflected the greatest honour on them, and at the same time put their humility to the greatest trial, was the reception they met with from Elizabeth, the Princess Palatine, aunt to George I. of Great Britain, a lady conspicuous for her genius and knowledge, and to whom Descartes had dedicated ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... elder Pascal became a centre of men of congenial intellectual tastes with himself, and his house a sort of rendezvous for the mathematicians and the physicists of the time. Among them were Descartes, Gassendi, Mersenne, Roberval, Carcavi, and Le Pailleur; and from the frequent reunion of these men is said to have sprung the Academy of Sciences founded in 1666. It is interesting to notice that it was into this same society ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... in these intellectual labours. We build up a pile, having for its base some slender modern metaphysician, ill able (poor man!) to sustain such a weight of philosophy. Upon this we place the Dutch quartos of Descartes and Spinoza; then a third story of Schoolmen in folio—the Master of Sentences, Suarez, Picus Mirandula, and the Telemonian bulk of Thomas Aquinas; and when the whole architecture seems firm and compact, we finish our system of metaphysics by roofing the whole with Duval's enormous ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Amsterdam is concerned. Already in 1618 the Venetian Antonio Donato wrote of Amsterdam that the streets and public places were so thronged "that the scene looked like a fair to end in one day"; and did not Descartes write in 1631, when he resided in Amsterdam, that nobody noticed him because he was the only non-tradesman in Amsterdam amidst a trading population, attentive to its profits. This reveals the bustling of the ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... 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 ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... 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 ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... 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 us in ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... that a wonderful improvement in the science and cultivation of the mind has taken place in these last days; that we are no longer puzzled with the strange phantoms, the wild speculations which occupied the giant minds of a Descartes, a Malebranch, a Locke, a Reid, a Stewart, and hosts of others, whose shining talents would have qualified them for the brightest ornaments of literature, real benefactors of mankind, had not their education lead them into dark and metaphysical reasonings, a ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... immediately in the close circle of the salons which 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 ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... Nicolas (1638-1715). Born 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, first ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... 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 is a fact of consciousness, of certain knowledge, and ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... la Vallee," and "La Grenadiere." Says Balzac of the habitant: "...He is a listless and unobliging individual." But the sojourner for a day will probably not notice this, and, if he should, must simply make allowance, and think with Henry James of the other memories of "this land of Rabelais, Descartes, and Balzac; of good dinners, good company, and good houses." To link the city still closer with letters, the first printing-press in Touraine was set up here in 1496. Nicolas Jensen, famed as the foremost Venetian printer of his time, was born in the neighbourhood and was at one time ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... born at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire on Christmas Day, 1642, the memorable year which saw the outbreak of the Civil War. In the year of the Restoration he entered Cambridge, where the teaching of Isaac Barrow quickened his genius for mathematics, and where the method of Descartes had superseded the older modes of study. From the close of his Cambridge career his life became a series of great physical discoveries. At twenty-three he facilitated the calculation of planetary movements by his theory of Fluxions. The optical discoveries to which ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... Christian faith from false conceptions, to 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 ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... 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 ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... involves, on the one hand, the observation of phenomena; on the other hand, also the discovery of the law, the essential being, the hidden force, that causes those phenomena—thus reducing the data supplied by observation to their simple principles. Intellectual consciousness was first extricated by Descartes from that sophistry of thought which unsettles everything. As it was the purely German nations among whom the principle of spirit first manifested itself, so it was by the Romanic nations that the abstract ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... great geometer, not in the same class as those that contributed to the progress of science with great discoveries, like Descartes, Newton, but certainly ranked among the geometers, whose works display a genius ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... worked unconsciously toward a very important end. She found a language crude and inelegant, manners coarse and licentious, morals dissolute and vicious. Her influence was at its height in the age of Corneille and Descartes, and she lived almost to the culmination of the era of Racine and Moliere, of Boileau and La Bruyere, of Bossuet and Fenelon, the era of simple and purified language, of refined and stately manners, and of at least outward ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... throughout the intervals, namely real time, plays no part in his calculation.... In short, the world on which the mathematician operates is a world which dies and is born anew at every instant, like the world which Descartes thought of when he spoke of a continued creation.' To know adequately what really happens we ought, Bergson insists, to see into the intervals, but the mathematician sees only their extremities. He fixes only a few results, he dots a curve and then interpolates, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... should be sorry to create any misapprehension, and to be taken for an uncompromising reactionist. I love the past, but I envy the future. It would have been very pleasant to have lived upon this planet at as late a period as possible. Descartes would be delighted if he could read some trivial work on natural philosophy and cosmography written in the present day. The fourth form school boy of our age is acquainted with truths to know which Archimedes would have laid down ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... Voltaire's own self, 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 of creatures, to check freedom of thought! Illustrious ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 all the boasted wisdom of the eighteenth century was folly; and that ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... philosophising and make facts bend to systems, instead of establishing systems upon facts. The grand and consistent theory of Newton will be placed upon the same footing as the wild and eccentric hypotheses of Descartes. In short, if the laws of nature are thus fickle and inconstant, if it can be affirmed and be believed that they will change, when for ages and ages they have appeared immutable, the human mind will no longer have any incitements to inquiry, but must remain fixed in inactive ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... outside self—such as 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 ourselves. When a philosopher centres self on self, in order to know self as a result of introspection, ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... 1828-38,) Theil XXXIV. s. 13.] The dominion of the land is at last contested, and we are saddened inexpressibly, that, from the elevation they have reached, these two peers of civilization can descend to practise the barbarism of war, and especially that the laud of Descartes, Pascal, Voltaire, and Laplace must challenge to bloody duel the laud of Luther, Leibnitz, ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... Descartes (1596-1650), the founder of modern philosophy, invented a method which may still be used with profit—the method of systematic doubt. He determined that he would believe nothing which he did not see quite clearly and distinctly to be true. Whatever he could bring himself ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... is to feed the mind on ideas, and ideas are not produced every day, nor for that matter every year, and luckily all ideas have not the same value. There are the ideas of Taine, of Rousseau, of Voltaire, of Descartes, of Montaigne, of Ficino, of Petrarch, of Dante, of Cicero, of Aristotle, of Plato; and in a moment I have run the gamut of all the centuries of our Western civilization. Who will tell me which ideas we shall need most tomorrow? ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... Some make 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 capacity ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... from 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 ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... chooses," said Don Inocencio, unable to contain his laughter, "he can speak to Socrates, St. Paul, Cervantes, or Descartes, as I speak to Librada to ask her for a match. Poor Senor de Rey! I was not mistaken in saying that there was something wrong ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... originated by Irish monks and illustrated by the fame of S. Aldhelm, and there died. His chief work was the de Divisione Naturae, in which he seems to anticipate much later philosophic argument (notably that of S. Anselm and Descartes as to the existence of God) and to have been the precursor if not the ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... sides, and beneficent in its nature; it is made up of masses of facts slowly accumulated and then summarily presented, or in rapid succession. For the first time in history the sciences expand and affirm each other to the extent of providing, not, as formerly, under Galileo and Descartes, constructive fragments, or provisional scaffolding, but a definite and demonstrated system of the universe, that of Newton.[3101] Around this capital fact, almost all the discoveries of the century, either as complementary or as prolongations, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of cookery, as Descartes, of French philosophy. It is said that Gonthier, in less than ten years, invented seven cullises, nine ragouts, thirty-one ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... 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 has done ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... his detachment from society that alone can be open-eyed and open-minded; who is qualified to carry on that "proper business of the understanding," "to think of everything just as it is in itself." [2] Descartes, although in habit of mind and speculative instinct he has so little in common with the Englishman, nevertheless finds in the individual's self-discipline and concentration the only hope of preserving the savor of the salt of knowledge. Thus ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... culture and development in 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 in Paris, varying in social position from the closest proximity ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... propound a true and durable explanation, than to arrest by a bold and comprehensive generalisation that attention, which is only imperfectly touched by mere collections of particular facts. The enormous impulse which even the most unscientific of the speculations of Descartes had given to European thought, was a standing temptation to philosophers, not to discard nor relax patient observation, but to bind together the results which they arrived at by this process, by means of some hardy hypothesis. It might be true or not, but it ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... heart a deist, but in any case the whole spirit of his writings was to exclude authority from the domain of scientific investigation which he did so much to stimulate. Descartes, illustrious not only as the founder of modern metaphysics but also by his original contributions to science, might seek to conciliate the ecclesiastical authorities—his temper was timid— but his philosophical method was a powerful incentive to rationalistic thought. The general tendency ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... active, alert, intelligent, attentive. He might have held his position indefinitely, and been handed down to the next generation with the family plate, had he kept a civil tongue in his red head and not quoted Descartes and Jean Jacques. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the scheme of necessity with the responsibility of man. Section II. The manner in which Hobbes, Collins, and others, endeavour to reconcile necessity with free and accountable agency. Section III. The sentiments of Descartes, Spinoza, and Malebranche, concerning the relation between liberty and necessity. Section IV. The views of Locke, Tucker, Hartley, Priestley, Helvetius, and Diderot, with respect to the relation between ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... balance between mind and spirit was achieved by Hugh of St. Victor, but afterwards the severance began and on the one side was the unwholesome hyper-spiritualization of the Rhenish mystics, on the other the false intellectualism of Descartes, Kant and the entire modern school of materialistic philosophy. It was the clear prevision of this inevitable issue that made of St. Bernard not only an implacable opponent of Abelard but of the whole system of Scholasticism as well. For ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... according as it works in excess, or 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 seat of ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... 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, for when the discussion had lasted some minutes, Tom went ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... 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 they learn the reasonable share of the principle ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry |
