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Beside Leighton and Flavel were placed Bacon and Descartes; dust lay upon John Newton's Sermons, while close by, rested in honoured, well-thumbed tatters, his great namesake, who read God's scriptures in the stars. In one corner by a large, unopened packet marked "Religious Society's Tracts;" it served as a stand for a large telescope, whose clumsiness betrayed the ingenuity of home manufacture.
M. Roberval also rose, in such a way that M. Descartes conducted him to a carriage, where the two were alone, and battled at one another more strongly than playfully, as M. Roberval, who returned here after dinner, told us. . . . I have forgotten to tell you that M. Descartes, annoyed at seeing so little of my brother, promised to return next day at eight o’clock. . . . He desired this, partly to consult regarding my brother’s illness, as to which, however, he did not communicate anything of importance, only he counselled him to remain in bed every day as long as he could till he was tired, and to take plenty of soup.
Should the reader chance to put his hand on the “Principles of Philosophy,” by La Forge, an immediate disciple of Descartes, he may see the phenomena of sleep solved in a copper-plate engraving, with all the figures into which the globules of the blood shaped themselves, and the results demonstrated by mathematical calculations.
A laborious reconstruction of a primitive and simple truth which the philosopher could not, for a single moment, have banished from his mind all the while that he was laboring painfully to demonstrate it. By a tacit avowal of the weakness of the human mind, the speculations of Descartes stopped short at death. He had hopes, however, of retarding the moment of it.
It seems that M. Descartes confesses also, in a passage of his Principles, that it is impossible to find an answer to the difficulties on the division of matter to infinity, which he nevertheless recognizes as actual.
The students were examined in the following bulky matters: Geometry, the Solar Spectrum, the Habeas Corpus Act, the British Parliament, and in Metaphysics they were asked to trace the progress of skepticism from Descartes to Hume. It is within bounds to say that some of the results were astonishing.
I may be deceived in thinking that there is an external world, and that I am awake and really perceive things; but I surely cannot be deceived unless I exist. Cogito, ergo sum I think, hence I exist; this truth Descartes accepted as the first principle of the new and sounder philosophy which he sought.
It was put together like a watch, it was many things, not one: if Descartes had lived in our time, he would have been delighted to compare it with a telephone system, the nerves taking the place of the wires, and being so arranged that all currents of 'animal spirit' flowing in them converged upon a single unit, a gland at the base of the brain.
The street terminates at the church of St. We retrace our steps, noting L. the old fountain at the corner of the Rue Pot de Fer, continue to the end of the Rue Mouffetard, and descend by the Rue Descartes, where at No. 50 is an inscription marking the site of the Porte St. Marcel called Porte Bordet.
Is it not generally taken for granted that it is the duty of more powerful and more enlightened nations to take the backward nations in hand, to exploit their resources, and, incidentally, to exploit them? Not that international law has not counted for something. Descartes and Spinoza could, with impunity, be heretics in little Holland.
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