Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/132

Rh out life. Even then he had begun to distrust the authority of tradition and his teachers. Two years before he left school he was selected as one of the twenty-four gentlemen who went forth to receive the heart of the murdered king as it was borne to its resting- place at La Fleche. At the age of sixteen he went home to his father, who was now settled at Rennes, and had taken a second wife from Brittany. During the winter of 1612 he completed his preparations for the world by lessons in horsemanship and fencing ; and then in the spring of 1613, he started as his own master to taste the pleasures of Parisian life. Fortunately the spirit of dissipation does not seem to have carried him any perilous lengths ; the worst we hear of is a passion for gaming. Here, too, he made the acquaintance of Claude Mydorge, one of the foremost mathematicians of France, and renewed an early intimacy with Marin Mersenne, an old fellow-student, senior by some years, at La Fleche, and now become Father Mersenne, of the order of Minim Friars. The withdrawal of the latter in 1614 to a post in the provinces was the signal for Descartes to abandon social life and shut him self up for nearly two years in a secluded house of the Faubourg St Germain. Accident, however, betrayed the secret of his retirement ; he was compelled to leave his mathematical investigations, and to take part in en tertainments, where the only thing that chimed in with his theorizing reveries was the music. The scenes of horror and intrigue which marked the struggle for supremacy between the various leaders who aimed at guid ing the politics of France made Paris no fit place for a student, and held out little honourable prospect for a soldier. Accordingly, in May 1617, Descartes, now twenty-one years of age, set out for the Netherlands and took service in the army of Prince Maurice of Orange, one of the greatest generals of the age, who had been engaged for some time in a war with the Spanish forces in Belgium. At Breda he enlisted as a volunteer, and the first and only pay which he accepted he kept as a curiosity through life. There was a lull in the war ; and the Nether lands were distracted by the quarrels of Gomarists and Arminians. During the leisure thus arising, Descartes one day, as he roved through Breda, had his attention drawn to a placard in the Dutch tongue ; and as the language, of which he never became perfectly master, was then strange to him, he asked a bystander to interpret it into either French or Latin. The stranger, who happened to be Isaac Beeckman, principal of the college of Dort, offered with some surprise to do so into Latin, if the inquirer would bring him a solution of the problem, for the advertisement was one of those challenges which the mathematicians of the age, in the spirit of the tournaments of chivalry, were accustomed to throw down to all comers, daring them to discover a geometrical mystery known as they fancied to themselves alone. Descartes promised and fulfilled ; and a friendship grew up between him and Beeckman broken only by the literary dishonesty of the latter, who in later years took credit for the novelty contained in a small essay on music (Compendium Musicce) which Descartes wrote at this period and intrusted to Beeckman. 1 After thus spending two years in Holland as a soldier in a period of peace, Descartes, in July 1619, attracted by the news &amp;lt;)f the impending struggle between the house of Austria and the Protestant princes, consequent upon the election of the palatine of the Rhine to the kingdom of Bohemia, set out for Upper Germany, and volunteered into the Bavarian service. The winter of 1619, spent 1 It was only published after the author s death ; and of it, besides tho French version, there exists an Eaglish translation &quot;by a Person of Quality.&quot; fa quarters at Neuburg on the Danube, was the critical period in his life. Here, in his warm room (dans utt poele), he indulged those meditations which afterwards led to the Discourse of Method. It was here that, on the eve of St Martin s day, ha &quot;was filled with enthusiasm, and discovered the foundations of a mar vellous science.&quot; He retired to rest with anxious thoughts of his future career, which haunted him through the night in three dreams, that left a deep impression on his mind. &quot; Next day,&quot; he -continues,- &quot; I began to understand the first principles of my marvellous discovery. &quot; The date of his philosophical conversion is thus fixed to a day. But the light was as yet dim ; he had only glimpses of a method which should invigorate the syllogism by the co-operation of ancient geometry and modern algebra. For during the year that elapsed before he left Swabia (and whilst he sojourned at Neuburg and Ulm), and amidst his geometrical studies, he would fain have gathered some knowledge of the mystical wisdom attributed to the Rosicrucians ; but the Invisibles, as they called them selves, kept their secret, and he found them not. His restlessness of spirit is well shown by a vow (which he himself records with the date of September 23, 1620), to make a pilgrimage to Loretto &quot; if possible, on foot from Venice ; if not, in the most devout manner he could.&quot; 3 Soon after the Bavarian troops were ordered into active service. He was present at the battle of Prague, where the hopes of the elector palatine were blasted (9th November 1620), passed the winter with the army in Southern Bohemia, and next ^ear served under Count Boucquoi in Hungary. On the death of this general Descartes quitted the imperial service, and in July 1621 began a peaceful tour through. Moravia, the borders of Poland, Pomeiania, Brandenburg, Holstein, and Friesland, from which he re-appeared in February 1622 in Belgium, and betook himself directly to his father s home in Brittany. The sole incident recorded of this excursion is his danger, when crossing in a small boat to Dutch Friesland, from the cupidity of the crew, who had taken him for a rich merchant, but at once abandoned their murderous designs when they saw him rise with drawn sword, in all the dignity of a French gentleman. At Rennes, where the young family of his stepmother was growing up, Descartes probably found little to interest him ; and, after he had visited the maternal estate which his father now put him in possession of, he took the opportunity of running up to Paris, where he found the Rosicrucians the topic of the hour, and heard himself credited with partnership in their secrets. A short visit to Brittany enabled him, with his father s consent, to arrange for the sale of his property in Poitou. The proceeds were invested in such a way at Paris as to bring him in a yearly income of between 6000 and 7000 francs, a sum probably equal to more than 500 at the present day. Towards the end of the year Descartes was on his way to Italy. The natural phenomena of Switzerland, and the political complications in the Valtellina, where the Catholic inhabitants had thrown off the yoke of the Grisons and called in the Papal and Spanish troops to their assist ance, delayed him some time ; but he reached Venice iu time to see the ceremony of the doge s wedlock with the Adriatic. After paying his vows at Loretto, he came to Rome, which was then on the eve of a year of jubilee an occasion which Descartes seized to observe the variety of men and manners which the city then embraced within its walls. In the spring of 1625 he returned home by Mount Cenis, observing the avalanches, 4 instead of, as his relatives hoped, securing a post in the French army in Piedmont. 2 (Euvres In&lits, i. 8. 3 CEuvres Inedita, i. 12. 4 CEuvres,v. 255. 