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 DESCARTES. 87 in Paris, and frequently changed it, he was still unable to secure the complete privacy and leisure for scientific work which he desired. Therefore he went to Holland in 1629, and spent twenty years of quiet productivity in Amsterdam, Franecker, Utrecht, Leeuwarden, Egmond, Harderwijk, Leyden, the palace of Endegeest, and five other places. His work here was interrupted only by a few journeys, but much disturbed in its later years by annoying controversies with the theologian Gisbert Voetius of Utrecht, with Regius, a pupil who had deserted him, and with professors from Leyden. His correspondence with his French friends was conducted through P^re Mersenne. In 1649 ^^^ yielded to pressing invitations from Queen Christina of Sweden and removed to Stockholm. There his weak constitution was not adequate to the severity of the climate, and death overtook him within a few months. The two decades of retirement in the Netherlands were Descartes's productive perio^L His motive in developing and writing out his thoughts was, essentially, the desire not to disappoint the widely spread belief that he was in possession of a philosophy more certain than the common one. The work entitled Le Monde, begun in 1630 and almost com- pleted, remained unprinted, as the condemnation of Galileo (1632) frightened our philosopher from publication ; frag- ments of it only, and a brief summary, appeared after the author's death. The chief works, the Discourse on Method, the Meditations on the First Philosophy, and the Principles of Philosophy, appeared- between 1637 and 1644, — tht Discours de la Methode in 1637, together with three dissertations (the "Dioptrics," the " Meteors," and the " Geometry "), under the common title, Essais Philosophiques. To the (six) Medi- tationes de Prima Philosophia, published in 1641, and dedi- cated to the Paris Sorbonne, are appended the objections of various savants to whom the work had been communi- cated in manuscript, together with Descartes's rejoinders. He himself considered the criticisms of Arnauld, printed fourth in order, as the most important. The Third Objec- tions are from Hobbes, the Fifth from Gassendi, the First, which were also the first received, from the theologian Caterus of Antwerp, while the Second and Sixth, collected