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Updated: September 4, 2025


On this point the doctrine of Locke, through Descartes, was also derived from Democritus. It was that all the sensible qualities of things, except position, shape, solidity, number and motion, were only ideas in us, projected and falsely regarded as lodged in things.

As a ship, which having lain becalmed with every stitch of canvas set, bounds away before the breeze which springs up astern, so the mind of Descartes, poised in equilibrium of doubt, not only yielded to the full force of the impulse towards physical science and physical ways of thought, given by his great contemporaries, Galileo and Harvey, but shot beyond them; and anticipated, by bold speculation, the conclusions, which could only be placed upon a secure foundation by the labours of generations of workers.

The confidence of the supporters of the mechanical theories of earlier days, from Descartes onward, that animals and the bodies of men were machines, mechanical automata, down to the mechanical theories of Lamettrie and Holbach, of l’homme machine, and of the système de la nature, was at least as great as, probably greater than, that of the supporters of the modern theories.

Let thy Sun, O thou only One, shelter me, the unworthy... I shut my eyes, I shut my ears, I do not breathe... in order to see, hear and breathe thee alone. It is curious to compare this Hindu prayer with the celebrated prayer of Descartes' "Meditation III" in his L'Existence de Dieu.

I have also shown that therein is observed that excellent law of continuity, which I have perhaps been the first to state, and which is a kind of touchstone whose test the rules of M. Descartes, of Father Fabry, Father Pardies, Father de Malebranche and others cannot pass.

"Well," said Jack, "when you have made some discovery that will enrol your name with Descartes, Huygens, Cassini, and such gentlemen, you will do us the honor of letting us know." "With the greatest pleasure." "It is a pity that Herschell has invented the telescope: he might have left you a chance for the glory of that invention."

Mersenne also, the friend of Descartes, and who had defended that philosopher when accused of having joined the Rosicrucians, attacked Dr. a Fluctibus, as he preferred to be called, and showed the absurdity of the brothers of the Rose-cross in general, and of Dr. a Fluctibus in particular.

Doubt is commonly something very cold, of very little vitalizing force, and above all something rather artificial, especially since Descartes degraded it to the function of a method. The conflict between reason and life is something more than a doubt. For doubt is easily resolved into a comic element.

She was then studying the philosophy of Descartes, and I became absorbed in questions of that kind to the neglect of everything else, until, fearing lest they might disturb my faith, I resolutely banished them from my mind.

It was in the very year of its publication, 1628, that Descartes withdrew into that life of solitary investigation and meditation of which his philosophy was the fruit.

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