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90 with difficulty I can persuade myself that he had never read Bacon’s works. In the prosecution of this undertaking, the first steps of Descartes are peculiarly interesting and instructive; and it is these alone which merit our attention at present. As for the details of his system, they are now curious only as exhibiting an amusing contrast to the extreme rigour of the principle from whence the author sets out; a contrast so very striking, as fully to justify the epigrammatic saying of D’Alembert, that “Descartes began with doubting of everything, and ended in believing that he had left nothing unexplained.”

Among the various articles of common belief which Descartes proposed to subject to a severe scrutiny, he enumerates particularly, the conclusiveness of mathematical demonstration; the existence of God; the existence of the material world; and even the existence of his own body. The only thing that appeared to him certain and incontrovertible, was his own existence; by which he repeatedly reminds us, we are to understand merely the existence of his mind, abstracted from all consideration of the material organs connected with it. About every other proposition, he conceived, that doubts might reasonably be entertained; but to suppose the non-existence of that which thinks, at the very moment it is conscious of thinking, appeared to him a contradiction in terms. From this single postulatum, accordingly, he took his departure; resolved to admit nothing as a philosophical truth, which could not be deduced from it by a chain of logical reasoning.

Having first satisfied himself of his own existence, his next step was to inquire, how far his perceptive and intellectual faculties were entitled to credit. For this purpose, he begins with offering a proof of the existence and attributes of God;—truths which he conceived to be necessarily involved in the idea he was able to form of a perfect, self-existent, and eternal being. His reasonings on this point it would be useless to state. It is sufficient to observe, that they led him to conclude, that God cannot possibly be supposed to deceive his creatures; and therefore, that the intimations of our senses, and the decisions of our reason, are to be trusted to with entire confidence, wherever they afford us clear and distinct ideas of their respective objects.