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Updated: May 5, 2025
In this respect the argument he sets over against the Cartesian, 'cogito ergo sum' is characteristic: "I am thinking," says he, "therefore I am": and is it not as good reasoning to say, I am sleeping, therefore I am? If a body moves, it must exist, no doubt; but if it is at rest, it must exist likewise.
Yet it was probably the influence of the great spiritual force of Jansenism that did most to check the immediate spread of Cartesian ideas. It was preponderant in France for fifty years. The date of the Discourse of Method is 1637. The Augustinus of Jansenius was published in 1640, and in 1643 Arnauld's Frequent Communion made Jansenism a popular power.
Thus the gauntlet was flung and it is important to note this before the appearance of the Discourse of Method ; but the influence of Descartes made itself felt throughout the controversy, and the most prominent moderns were men who had assimilated Cartesian ideas.
When that which is feared or hoped for has come to pass, joy and grief come in, which relate to existing good and evil, as desire relates to those to come. The Cartesian theory of the passions forms the bridge over which its author passes from psychology to ethics.
The sun that shifts now north, now south of him; the seasons that go by fours instead of twos; the trees that blossom and bear fruit from January to December, with no apparent regard for the calendar months as by law established; the black, brown, or yellow people, who know not his creed or his social code; the castes and cross-divisions that puzzle and surprise him; the pride and the scruples, deeper than those of civilised life, but that nevertheless run counter to his own; the economic conditions that defy his preconceptions; the virtues and the vices that equally rub him up the wrong way all these things are highly conducive to the production of that first substratum of philosophic thinking, a Socratic attitude of supreme ignorance, a pure Cartesian frame of universal doubt.
"Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites." VIRGIL, Eclog. "'Tis not for us to end such great disputes." This famous Newton, this destroyer of the Cartesian system, died in March, anno 1727. His countrymen honoured him in his lifetime, and interred him as though he had been a king who had made his people happy.
Here, perhaps, modern speculations about the constitution of matter may help us if we use them with due reserve to grasp Spinoza's notion of a "res singularis in actu" or as it might be rendered freely, "a creature of individual functions," for what is called the "vortex theory," though as old as Cartesian philosophy, has recently flashed into sudden prominence.
At the salon of Mme. de Sablé originated many famous literary works, such as the Conférences sur le Calvinisme, works on Cartesian philosophy, the Logique de Port-Royal, Questions sur l'Amour, Les Maximes, etc. She will be remembered as the initiator of many maxims, in the composition of which she excelled. A number of her sayings concerning friendship have been preserved.
Fontenelle was an anima naturaliter moderna. Trained in the principles of Descartes, he was one of those who, though like Descartes himself, too critical to swear by a master, appreciated unreservedly the value of the Cartesian method. Sometimes, he says, a great man gives the tone to his age; and this is true of Descartes, who can claim the glory of having established a new art of reasoning.
Or it may be Cotton Mather, his son, rolling forth his resounding discourse during a thunder-storm, entitled "Brantologia Sacra," consisting of seven separate divisions or thunderbolts, and filled with sharp lightning from Scripture and the Rabbinical lore, and Cartesian natural philosophy.
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