Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/856

836 that could not be acquired elsewhere. From his observations he gained the great advantages of learning to believe nothing lightly, and not to hold obstinately to the things which example and habit had accustomed him to believe. He visited Holland, France, Italy, Switzerland, the Tyrol, Venice, and Rome. At Venice he witnessed the ceremony of the wedding of the Doge with the Adriatic. He made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Loretto.

Returning to France, Descartes entertained for a time the thought of purchasing a position as lieutenant-general of the province, at Chatellerault, but the legal chicanery connected with the office was not to his taste, and he gave up the scheme. He then took lodgings in Paris, and lived in the style of a modest gentleman at ease. He gathered a few friends around him, among whom were Mersenne and Mydorge, who were interested in the problems of the refraction of light; and together they experimented in the grinding of lenses. With others who came to witness the experiments, the house became a kind of academy, and too busy a resort to favor Descartes's studies. Meetings of literary men and students had become common in Paris, the more important ones being held with the Papal nuncio and Cardinal Richelieu. Descartes, urged by his friends, attended them frequently. He had, in his reflections on the choice of a position, become confirmed in the thought that he should not confine himself to any business, but should devote his life to the cultivation of the reason, and to advancement by every possible means in the knowledge of the truth according to the method which he had prescribed. At one of the meetings Cardinal de Bdrulle was struck by a remark of Descartes's that the true art of memory was not to be gained by technical devices, but by a philosophical appreciation of things. He was thereby prompted to urge upon him a plan of life in almost exact accord with his conviction.

His associations in Paris, with their distractions not being favorable to the close attention which he sought to exercise to qualify himself for the execution of his purpose, Descartes determined to retire to some place where he could be alone and could pursue his studies untrammeled. He went to Holland, where he found variety and congenial retreats during the period from 1629 to 1649 in thirteen different places, and where he composed or revised most of his works. In the choice of these residences he seems to have been influenced, according to Mr. Wallace, by the two considerations of the neighborhood of a university or college, and the amenities of the situation. He appears to have also had a decidedly religious inclination. He found Franeker, the seat of a university, very agreeable, because it afforded him opportunity for attending mass, and gave him freedom in the religious exercises on which his attention was apparently most fixed during the