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 DESCARTES 37 man knowledge, which had long been maturing in his mind, took a definite shape. While he wandered from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, he was digesting the outlines of the great dis- coveries in geometry and method, destined soon to change the intellectual currents of the world. Going first to Paris, where he moved about from one obscure house to another to escape the in- trusion of friends, he next settled in the neigh- boring country, and finally fixed his retreat in Holland. Emancipated from all social ties and relations, his life became that of an ascetic. In 1633 he made a brief visit to England, and the following year to Amsterdam; and he con- stantly, through the mediation of Mersenne, maintained an active correspondence with the learned men who sought his instruction or his friendship. In 1637 he began a more open career by the publication of a volume entitled Discours de la methode, which contained trea- tises on method, on dioptrics, on meteors, and on geometry. The first of these, besides an admirable picture of his life and of the progress of his studies, furnished a clear out- line of a new science of metaphysics, only expanded in his later and larger works. In 1641 he published in Latin Meditationes de Prima Philosophies, which carried his specu- lations into abstruse questions as to the exist- ence of God and the immortality of the soul. He invited criticisms of these, which in later editions are arranged and replied to under sev- en heads, wherein he considers all the objec- tions raised to his original system. These works filled Europe with his name, and at the close of 1641 he was invited to France by Louis XIII., but he refused to quit his retirement. In 1644 appeared Principia Philosophic, which three years later was translated into French by Claude Picot. He then went to France, where a pension of 3,000 livres a year was conferred upon him ; but as Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to Stockholm, at the same time ap- )inting him director of an academy which le proposed to establish, at a salary of 3,000 'owns a year, he was induced once more to ibandon his native country. The rigors of the limate, combined with the early hours exacted the queen, in an eccentric wish to take les- )ns from him, led to his death in less than ro years. He was buried at Stockholm ; but 16 years afterward Louis XIV. caused his re- lains to be disinterred and carried to France, rhere he was entombed in the church of Ste. renevieve du Mont. Descartes created an epoch in the history of the human mind, and should be classed with men like Plato, Aris- totle, Bacon, Newton, and Kant. With Bacon, he was one of the founders of modern philoso- phy, but he pushed his inquiries further than Bacon in many respects, and in a somewhat dif- ferent sphere. What the latter accomplished for natural science, Descartes accomplished for moral and metaphysical. As a metaphysician, he was the fountain head of the speculation of a whole subsequent century, while he added to his glory in that sphere the scarcely inferior distinction of a great discoverer in mathema- tics, and of an earnest laborer in nearly all the domains of physical science then known. Not wholly exempt from the errors of his day, he was yet immeasurably in advance of his day ; while he enjoys this singular eminence among philosophers, that his expression is as clear and beautiful as his thought is great. French style appears nowhere more simple and direct than in the varied dissertations of Descartes, even when he treats of subjects the most recondite and difficult. It was owing to this admirable clearness, perhaps, as much as to the more essential merits of his system, that it was said at the time of Descartes's death that everybody in England and France, who thought at all, thought Cartesianism. The fundamental prin- ciples of the philosophy of Descartes relate to his method, which takes its point of departure in universal doubt, and places the criterion of all certitude in evidence, or in other words, in reason, as the sovereign judge of the true and the false ; to the erection of the individual con- sciousness into the fundamental ground and source of all correct philosophy (Cogito, ergo sum) ; to the radical distinction which is drawn between the soul and the body, the essential attribute of the former being thought, and that of the latter extension ; to the demonstration of the existence of God from the very idea of the infinite ; to the division of ideas into those which are innate, those which are factitious, or created by us, and those which are adven- titious, or come from without by means of the senses ; to the definition of substance, as that which so exists as to need nothing else for its existence, and which is applicable in the high- est sense only to God, who has his ground in himself, but only relatively to the thinking and corporeal substances, which need the coopera- tion of God to their existence; and to the affirmation that the universe depends upon the productive power, not only for its first exist- ence, but for its continued being and opera- tion, or in other words, that conservation is perpetual creation. Other points in this phi- losophy are important, and other aspects of it are to be regarded by the student ; but for the popular reader these chiefly deserve attention, because these were characteristic and creative, and furnished the themes for the greater part of the agitated discussions of later years. From his theory of doubt, except upon evidence, for instance, the philosophy of the 17th century, and the whole of modern philosophy in fact, derived that disdain for the authority which formerly fettered the free movements of the mind, and that reliance upon reason, which Arnauld, Male- branche, Pascal, Bossuet, F6nelon, and others appealed to so effectively. The vivid determi- nation of the consciousness, or the ME, as the proper object of metaphysical investigation, was the starting point of those great systems of thought, both Scotch and German, which are such remarkable phenomena in the history