Page:Imperialdictiona02eadi Brandeis.pdf/95

DES first for the church, he entered a jesuit college and distinguished himself by his progress in mathematical studies. Quitting his first masters he resolved on being a surgeon, and received his first instruction from a practitioner of his native village, who was at once surgeon and barber. He came to Paris in 1764, and two years afterwards commenced a course of lectures on anatomy. In 1776 he was admitted a member of the corporation of surgeons, appointed chief surgeon of the college hospital, and consulting-surgeon to that of St. Sulpice. Six years later he was appointed surgeon-major of the hôpital de la Charité, and, on the death of Terraud, chief surgeon of the Hotel-Dieu. Desault was denounced in the revolutionary societies in 1792, and suffered a short imprisonment in the Luxembourg. His death, suspected to have been the effect of poison, occurred while he was attending the dauphin in the prison of the temple. Desault's works are not numerous—the "Journal de chirurgie," which extends to four volumes; and "Traité des Maladies chirurgicales." But he contributed greatly by his indefatigable labours to the advancement of anatomical studies in France.—R. M., A.  * DESBŒUFS,, the most celebrated French engraver of gems of modern times, is a pupil of Cartellier. Besides many intaglios and cameos of considerable beauty, Desbœufs has produced several works of sculpture, both busts and statues. Born in 1793 in Paris.—R. M.  DESCAMPS,. See.  DESCARTES,, was born at La Haye in Touraine, on the 31st of March, 1596. He sprang from one of the best families of that province, and inherited a moderate competency, which enabled him, in after life, to follow the philosophic bent of his mind without difficulty or distraction. When about eight years of age, he was sent to the Jesuit's college at La Flèche, where he remained, in all, about eight years longer. During this period of his life he appears to have devoted himself mainly to poetry and mathematics, particularly the latter. He was of course conducted by the professors through the regular course of physics and philosophy; but even at that early age he became deeply impressed with the uncertainty of the premises they laid down, and the conclusions they drew from them, and felt even then the first rising desire to see a totally new reconstruction of all the sciences. Influenced by these doubts which pressed upon him, he returned home and gave up all literary pursuits. His father, after a while, sent him to Paris, to see the world, and acquire the general culture which was considered necessary in a youth of noble origin. Here he gave himself up for a time to pleasure and dissipation; but the silent reproaches of his best friend, Father Mersenne, brought him back before it was too late to his original love both of study and virtue. He hid himself therefore away in some corner of the metropolis, concealed from all his associates, and there devoted his whole time, for above two years, to mathematical and other philosophical pursuits. Emerging once more from his solitude, he yielded to the instances of his friends and family, to take up the military profession; perhaps he also thought that the great problems of human life might appear to him in a new and a clearer light, if he withdrew himself for a time from all theorizing, and entered into more practical and active pursuits. What philosophy failed to teach him, he hoped to acquire in the way of personal experience. For this purpose he first betook himself to Holland, where he served under Prince Maurice as a volunteer; but as there were no active operations in hand, he gave up his commission, and entered the Bavarian service. We find him soon after taking part in the Thirty Years' war, where he witnessed the struggle of arms in Bohemia and Hungary, and bore himself right bravely. In 1622, after nearly five years' experience of military life, he returned home to France, and renounced the profession. He appears to have taken no interest whatever in the political quarrels of the age, and to have used his experience in war merely to study human passions; to see the application of mechanical principles to practical uses; and to extend his knowledge of mathematical and physical science generally. Having now been put in possession of a comfortable income inherited from his mother, Descartes lived quietly for a time at home; making excursions occasionally as far as Switzerland and Italy, and acquiring a steadily increasing fame as a mathematician and a philosopher. The fame which he thus acquired was little to his taste; and the perpetual disturbance to which he was subject at Paris, as it increased more and more widely, determined him to return into Holland, where he spent nearly the whole of the remainder of his life. His motive for taking this step might have been not merely the desire of philosophic repose, but also the consideration that he might, in the course of his future career, find a land of universal toleration, as necessary to his peace as it was agreeable to his temperament. In this retreat, to which he betook himself in his thirty-third year, he composed all his principal works; and only communicated with the great world without, through the intermediate agency of his old and faithful friend Mersenne. A few more lines will finish his biography. In Holland Descartes lived and studied for twenty years, devoting himself to optics, meteorology, anatomy, chemistry, and mechanics, as well as to the reform of philosophy itself. In 1649 he yielded to the pressing invitation of Queen Christina of Sweden, to remove to the court of Stockholm, and become her private tutor. The breaking up of his old habits, combined with the severity of the climate, however, threw him soon upon a bed of sickness; and in 1650 he died in the fifty-third year of his age.

We must now turn from the life of Descartes to his literary labours, and especially those which have exerted a lasting influence upon the progress of human thought. Descartes lived at a period in which a manifest crisis was passing in relation to the entire intellectual condition of Europe. The age of authority was fast drifting to its close. Already the spread of the Reformation had invalidated its claims in regard to religious dogmas; and the genius of Bacon had given a death-blow to the influence of Aristotle, together with that of the whole scholastic edifice, which reared itself upon his philosophy as the foundation. The entire mind of the western world was in a state of fermentation; and every new system which promised to bring harmony into the reigning disorder, while it was feared by a few, was welcomed by the masses as a new and much-needed light to guide them to some sure and certain conclusions. This, then, was the point of view from which Descartes began his whole attempt to renovate the philosophy of the age. To him authority was absolutely worthless; its utterances, in truth, were so discordant that all he could do was to set it wholly on one side, and begin everything anew. Falling back therefore upon himself—upon the light of his own reason, and the evidence presented to his own faculties—he determined to start simply from here; and to see if it were not possible to find some basis of certainty on which to build a superstructure, more or less complete, of lasting and unquestionable truth. The attempts to do this are contained in three small volumes—the "Discours de la Methode," published in the French language in the year 1637; the "Principia Philosophiæ," published at Amsterdam, in 1644; and the "Meditationes de primâ Philosophiâ, in quibus Dei existentia, et animæ immortalitas demonstrantur," published also at Amsterdam in the year 1647. These three works are merely so many successive statements of his fundamental principles; so that, without giving any separate analysis of each, we may attempt to reproduce the general train of argument which runs through the whole. He begins by professing his conviction, that he had held from his very earliest years many false opinions for true ones; and that, consequently, all the conclusions he had built upon them during his whole life, must be quite uncertain. Amongst these false opinions he reckons the infallibility of the senses, and shows that the frequent deceptions they practise upon us entirely destroy all the confidence we are naturally disposed to place in them. The same uncertainty, he goes on to show, attaches to the representations of the memory, and equally so to the conclusions and dictates of our reasoning faculty. In a very lucid and simple style, Descartes thus reproduces the most apposite and striking arguments of scepticism, and at length arrives at the main position which he is all along aiming at—I mean the necessity of universal doubt as the only starting-point of all true philosophy. Descartes' doubt, however, is in spirit a very different thing from scepticism properly so called. Scepticism rejoices in negations and uncertainties, and will not be drawn out of them, even by the most lucid evidence; but doubt in the Cartesian sense, is simply the preparatory rejection of all false or unsupported opinions, in order to open the mind to the reception of true ones. Thus it comes very much to the same thing as Bacon's disquisitions on the various "idola," to which the human mind is so liable to offer unreasonable worship. Bacon calls the mind's preparation for truth a silence; Descartes calls it doubt. They both mean, however, the same thing—namely, a freedom 