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Updated: June 24, 2025
In this symbolic expression of his right of property in their souls and bodies, perhaps the preacher rose a little above the heads of his audience. Most of his flock were busied with a kind of speculation so foreign to that of metaphysics that they would have been puzzled to explain what was meant by Descartes' famous COGITO ERGO SUM, on which the preacher laid so much stress.
The philosophy has not yet found the proof of the existence of man, and when cogito ergo sum of Cartesius was not sufficient for it, the question is still open.
Thus the settled point of departure required for knowledge is found in the self-certitude of the thinking ego. From the fact that I doubt, i.e., think, it follows that I, the doubter, the thinker, am. Cogito, ergo sum is the first and most certain of all truths. The principle, "I think, therefore I am," is not to be considered a deduction from the major premise, "Whatever thinks exists."
We must be like Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up heaven defend me from ever feeling quite grown up, for then I should come to a standstill; so the reader must take what I have to say simply as the talk of one boy to another in the Great School, and not expect too much. The first question then is, where to begin. Descartes commenced his book with the words "Cogito, ergo sum."
God! what contradictions when we seek to join in wedlock life and reason! The truth is sum, ergo cogito I am, therefore I think, although not everything that is thinks. Is not consciousness of thinking above all consciousness of being? Is pure thought possible, without consciousness of self, without personality?
On the bit of firm ground thus thoroughly tested, he proceeded to place a formula not less carefully verified, his famous 'Cogito, ergo sum' 'I think, therefore I am. By many of his followers, however, this second verification of his is deemed to be by no means so satisfactory as it was by himself, Professor Huxley more especially taking vehement, though, as I make bold to add, somewhat gratuitous, exception to every single word of the most celebrated of Cartesian formulæ.
If Cogito ergo sum is an institution to which we can trust, why is not Non cogito ergo non sum?" Here is a man posing before the gaping millions as a philosopher and a severe logician, who thinks that the proposition, "every cow is a quadruped," is disproved by the evident falsehood of, "what is not a cow is not a quadruped," which he calls "the converse."
The early study of Plato and Plotinus, with the commentaries and the THEOLOGIA PLATONICA of the illustrious Florentine; of Proclus, and Gemistius Pletho; and at a later period of the De Immenso et Innumerabili and the "De la causa, principio et uno," of the philosopher of Nola, who could boast of a Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville among his patrons, and whom the idolaters of Rome burnt as an atheist in the year 1600; had all contributed to prepare my mind for the reception and welcoming of the Cogito quia Sum, et Sum quia Cogito; a philosophy of seeming hardihood, but certainly the most ancient, and therefore presumptively the most natural.
The whole fabric of beliefs and rational principles was to be subjected to a re-examination, and Descartes found himself on bedrock when he touched his famous Cogito, ergo sum. The simple fact or act of Doubt implied the Activity the Reality therefore of the Doubter.
I recollect the mixture of mirth and vexation depicted in his face one morning, when on his remarking that I did not look well and inquiring if any thing ailed me, I replied, "No, but I could not get any sleep." "What prevented your sleeping?" "I was thinking, papa, of 'Cogito, ergo sum' 'I think, therefore I exist' and I lay awake, trying to find out all about it."
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