"Descartes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unconsciously toward a very important end. She found a language crude and inelegant, manners coarse and licentious, morals dissolute and vicious. Her influence was at its height in the age of Corneille and Descartes, and she lived almost to the culmination of the era of Racine and Moliere, of Boileau and La Bruyere, of Bossuet and Fenelon, the era of simple and purified language, of refined and stately manners, and of at ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... where to begin. Descartes commenced his book with the words "Cogito, ergo sum." "I think, therefore I am," and we cannot do better than follow his example. There are two things about which we cannot have any doubt—our own existence, and that of the world ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... a pure ethereal fluid, whose existence probably did not rest on any more solid foundation than analogy or tradition. One hundred years after Copernicus had given to the world the true arrangements of our planetary system, Descartes advanced his theory of vortices in the ethereal medium, in which the planets were borne in orbits around the sun, and the satellites around their primaries. This idea retained its ground with various additions, until the Geometry of Newton reconciled the laws of Kepler ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... social life of the princes at the German Diets, a picture from the XVIth Century, the sequel of a memoir by Guhrauer on Elizabeth, Abbess of Herford, a friend of William Penn, and a correspondent of Malebranche, Leibnitz and Descartes, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... subject to the dogmas of the Church. To purge the Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to the reason, has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as yet by any means accomplished. On the one side, Descartes and Bacon and Spinoza and Locke are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the Renaissance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. The ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... proposal the Academy decided that, in future, it would give as the subject of the eloquence prize, the eulogiums of the great men of the nation. Marshal Saxe, Duguay Trouin, Sully, D'Aguesseau, Descartes, figured first on this list. Later, the Academy felt itself authorized to propose the eloge of kings themselves; it entered on this new branch at the beginning of 1767, by asking for the ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... bright. Go, then, out of this haunted place where a human madness broke through the Barrier. Be satisfied with the victories you have had. Let the visits of the Dark One fade into mere nightmare; and know I am no more a living woman than Franchina Descartes." ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... by tiresome seeing and hearing, that they are facts. The old excitement of thought has half died out, or rather it is diffused in quiet pleasure over a life instead of being concentrated in intense and eager spasms. An old philosopher—a Descartes, suppose—fancied that out of primitive truths, which he could by ardent excogitation know, he might by pure deduction evolve the entire universe. Intense self-examination, and intense reason would, he thought, ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... their theoretic contributions, were not only not of value, but to some extent at least hindered human progress by diverting men from the field of observation to that of speculation. It is interesting to realize that Averroes did in his time what Descartes did many centuries later, and many another brilliant thinker has done before ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... of the phenomena on this principle, we find curious gradations between the higher and the humbler orders of minds. The vortices of Descartes, for instance, involve but a simple idea, that might have been struck out by almost any individual of a tolerably lively fancy, who had walked by the side of a winding river, and seen sticks and straws revolving in its eddies. But no fancy, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... comprehensive generalisation that attention, which is only imperfectly touched by mere collections of particular facts. The enormous impulse which even the most unscientific of the speculations of Descartes had given to European thought, was a standing temptation to philosophers, not to discard nor relax patient observation, but to bind together the results which they arrived at by this process, by means of some hardy hypothesis. It might be true or not, but it was at any rate sure ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... they fell insensibly into a system, and philosophers like Descartes and Newton arrived at a general physics. This physics, however, was not yet meant to cover the whole existent world, or to be the genetic account of all things in their system. Descartes excluded from his physics the whole mental and moral world, which became, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... breadth and the scope which she sensed more or less vaguely in The Evolution of Sociology. Holman Sommers quoted freely, and discussed boldly and frankly, such abstruse authors as Descartes, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Comte, Gumplowicz, some of them names she had never heard of and could not even spell without following her copy letter by letter. Holman Sommers seemed to have read all of them and to have weighed all of them and to be able to quote all of them offhand; whereas ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... same metaphysical method that was as young as the youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older—the same that moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib; that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... public interest—such were Colbert's maneuvers. A detestable delight at an approaching downfall, untiring efforts to attain this object, means of seduction no less wicked than the crime itself—such were the weapons Marguerite employed. The crooked atoms of Descartes triumphed; to the man without compassion was united a woman without heart. The marquise perceived, with sorrow rather than indignation, that the king was an accomplice in the plot which betrayed the duplicity of Louis XIII. in his advanced age, and the avarice of ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... responsible for his actions, which have, therefore, no moral value; (2) in psychology, for all actions which are not the result of conation or conscious endeavour. Certain actions being admittedly automatic, Descartes maintained that, in regard of the lower animals, all action is purely mechanical. The same theory has since been applied to man, with this difference that, accompanying the mechanical phenomena of action, and entirely disconnected with it, are the phenomena of consciousness. Thus ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... of Locke was in the ascendant, more spiritual forms of philosophy fell into disrepute. Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz were considered almost obsolete; More and Cudworth were out of favour: and there was but scanty tolerance for any writer who could possibly incur the charge of transcendentalism or mysticism. It is not that ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... inevitable result of the adoption of some of Mill's proposed social reforms, I could not avoid recalling that wise dictum of Frederick the Great concerning philosophers—a saying which Buckle quotes so triumphantly against Plato, Aristotle, Descartes—even Bacon, Newton, and a long list of names illustrious in the annals of English literature. Frederick declared: 'If I wanted to ruin one of my provinces I would make over its government to the philosopher.' With due deference to Buckle's superior ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Physics only apparent: evolution not revolution the rule in Physical Theory— Revival of metaphysical speculation and influence of Descartes: all phenomena reduced to matter and movement— Modern physicists challenge this: physical, unlike mechanical, phenomena seldom reversible—Two schools, one considering experimental laws imperative, the other merely studying ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... Maimonides. But why should a minister of instruction take that into consideration? The minister and the author—both presumably over twenty-five years of age—might have heard this very question propounded and answered some years before. They might have known that their colleague Victor Cousin, to save Descartes from the disgrace of having stood sponsor to Spinozism, had established a far-fetched connection between the Dutch philosopher and the Spanish, pronouncing Spinoza the devoted disciple of Maimonides. Perhaps ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... it? I reply that I am stumped at once, unless I am allowed to fix upon an object definitely and precisely. This, no doubt, is arguing in a circle; but Descartes himself assumed what he was to try to prove. This, then, being permitted, I have chosen my object, and we can now go on again. What is it? Some might evade the difficulty by taking a middle course. You are not, they ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... Descartes (1596-1650), the founder of modern philosophy, invented a method which may still be used with profit—the method of systematic doubt. He determined that he would believe nothing which he did not see ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... comparison with what remains to be known; and that we could be free of an infinitude of maladies both of body and mind, and even also possibly of the infirmities of age, if we had sufficient knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies with which nature has provided us. (Descartes: Discourse on the Method, Philosophical Works. Translated by E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Vol. I, Cam. Univ. ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... this century whose names deserve recording were Descartes and Gassendi, whose mathematical researches in their application to astronomy were of much value; Fabricius, Torricelli, and Maraldi, who by their observations and investigations added many facts to the general ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... Corneille, if we would understand those extraordinary souls which, always at the highest degree of tension, deny themselves, as a weakness, everything that resembles tenderness or pity. Again, thus and thus alone can we explain how Descartes, and with him all the philosophers of his century, ran counter to all common sense, and refused to recognise that animals might possess a soul-like principle which, however remotely, might link ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... important to note that the principle of the scientific Naturalism of the latter half of the nineteenth century, in which the intellectual movement of the Renascence has culminated, and which was first clearly formulated by Descartes, leads not to the denial of the existence of any Supernature;[12] but simply to the denial of the validity of the evidence adduced in favour of this, or of that, extant ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... said Don Inocencio, unable to contain his laughter, "he can speak to Socrates, St. Paul, Cervantes, or Descartes, as I speak to Librada to ask her for a match. Poor Senor de Rey! I was not mistaken in saying that there was something wrong in ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... persons to think of their own historic position, else we might have expected to find him musing on the saving shelter which this land of freedom and tolerance had given to more than one of his great precursors in the literature of emancipation. Descartes had found twenty years of priceless freedom (1629-1649) among the Dutch burghers. The ruling ideas of the Encyclopaedia came in direct line from Bayle (d. 1706) and Locke (d. 1704), and both Bayle and Locke, though ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... cannot see their style. With the Latin works of writers who think for themselves, the case is different, and their style is visible; writers, I mean, who have not condescended to any sort of imitation, such as Scotus Erigena, Petrarch, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and many others. An affectation in style is like making grimaces. Further, the language in which a man writes is the physiognomy of the nation to which he belongs; and here there are many hard and fast differences, beginning ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum—whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum— "I think that ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... of artesian wells, I fancy," he said in his kindly voice; and he began to give her a brief outline of Descartes' philosophy, which it is to be feared she did not at all appreciate. She was not sorry when Erica appealed to him for some disputed fact, in which they all seemed most extraordinarily interested, for when ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... result, if we persist in restricting ourselves to the contemplation of one fact. We must avail ourselves of all accessible facts. Human psychology can never be completely resolved except through comparative psychology. With Descartes, we must inquire whether the souls of animals be relations of the human soul, less perfect members in the same series of development. We must take account of what we discover in the intelligent principle of the ant, as well as what we ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... degree of eloquence, and prudently made use of the ordinary theological arguments. But to influence such a mind as Byron's more was required. In the search after truth, he looked for hard logic, and eloquence was not required by him. Fenelon could not have persuaded him; but Descartes might have influenced him. He preferred, in fact, in such arguments, the method of the geometrician to that of the artist; the one uses truth to arrive at truth, the other makes use of the beautiful only, to arrive at ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... counts—that which flows throughout the intervals, namely real time, plays no part in his calculation.... In short, the world on which the mathematician operates is a world which dies and is born anew at every instant, like the world which Descartes thought of when he spoke of a continued creation.' To know adequately what really happens we ought, Bergson insists, to see into the intervals, but the mathematician sees only their extremities. He fixes only a few results, he dots a curve and then interpolates, he substitutes ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... upon his lap and read his notes attentively. Being almost word perfect in many parts of them, he now spent his unexpected leisure in acquiring accurately the language of still further paragraphs. "The sharp line of demarcation which Descartes drew between consciousness and the material world," whispered Oscar with satisfaction, and knew that if Descartes were on the examination paper he could start with this and go on for nearly twenty lines before he would ...
— Philosophy 4 - A Story of Harvard University • Owen Wister
... individualist because it is the individual in his detachment from society that alone can be open-eyed and open-minded; who is qualified to carry on that "proper business of the understanding," "to think of everything just as it is in itself." [2] Descartes, although in habit of mind and speculative instinct he has so little in common with the Englishman, nevertheless finds in the individual's self-discipline and concentration the only hope of preserving the savor of the salt of ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... would stand thus—Is the Will an agent? If so, is it a free agent?—in actual discussion it was long taken for granted that the Will is an agent, and hence the only controversy gathered round the question whether the Will is a free agent. Descartes, indeed, seems to have entertained the prior question with regard to animals, and there are passages in the Leviathan which may be taken to imply that Hobbes entertained this question with regard to man. But it was not until recent years that any such question could stand upon a basis of science ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... Aniela any longer, and yet could not live without her. It was the first time I felt this—I might call it psychical dualism. Formerly my love went through its regular course. I said to myself, "I love her, therefore I desire her,"—with the same logic as Descartes employs in the statement, "I think, therefore I exist." Now the formula is changed into, "I do not love her, but desire her still;" and both elements exist in me as if they were engraved on two separate stones. For ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... that she had been a queen, and many examples might be given of her haughty demeanor in the presence of those who were unwilling to do her bidding. Before leaving Sweden, Christine had tried to gather a circle of learned men about her at Stockholm, and the great French philosopher Descartes spent some months in her palace. Later, when in Paris, on her way to Italy, a special session of the French Academy had been held in her honor, and all of the literary men of France went out to the palace at Fontainebleau while she was domiciled ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... on fundamental instincts which are visible at the beginning of animal life. Descartes defined jealousy as "a kind of fear related to a desire to preserve a possession." Every impulse of acquisition in the animal world is stimulated into greater activity by the presence of a rival who may snatch beforehand the coveted ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... admit of our tracing in them a regular succession. They seem also to be in part reflections of the past, and it is difficult to separate in them what is original and what is borrowed. Doubtless they have a relation to one another—the transition from Descartes to Spinoza or from Locke to Berkeley is not a matter of chance, but it can hardly be described as an alternation of opposites or figured to the mind by the vibrations of a pendulum. Even in Aristotle and Plato, rightly understood, ...
— Sophist • Plato
... he who cannot perceive the connection which exists between two different ideas is an imbecile. As a matter of fact, love has its great men although they be unrecognized, as war has its Napoleons, poetry its Andre Cheniers and philosophy its Descartes. ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... here for ever!" said Claude, one afternoon, in the inn garden at Beddgelert, "and say, not with Descartes, 'I think, therefore I exist;' but simply, 'I enjoy, therefore I exist.' I almost think those Emersonians are right at times, when they crave the 'life of plants, and stones, and rain.' Stangrave said to me once, that his ideal of perfect bliss was that of an ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... or the law of Excluded Middle. We may not take Moses and the prophets without proof, but Curtius and Professor Max Mueller may speak, and we must but hear. And later, when Mr Arnold is trying to cope with Descartes, he flies for refuge to "the roots as, bhu, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... brief and well-timed reference to the accomplished Hypatia, familiar to ladies from Kingsley's novel—in the days when ladies used to read novels—and also the Royal ladies whom Descartes and Leibnitz found apter disciples than the savants. It was, however, he remarked, an impertinence to suppose that any apology was needed for introducing such subjects before ladies. He plunged therefore at once in medias res, and made his first lecture ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... treatises of Maimonides and Crescas. His thought became sceptical, and though he was "intoxicated with a sense of God," he had no love for any positive religion. He learned Latin, and found new avenues opened to him in the writings of Descartes. His associations with the representatives of the Cartesian philosophy and his own indifference to ceremonial observances brought him into collision with the Synagogue, and, in 1656, during the absence of Manasseh ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... 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. Without doubt, there were students present who justified their teacher's wisdom in introducing them to these studies; but the fact is also evident that others had been pushed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and thinking being, as I suppose, and verily believe you are, it must be unnecessary, and to a certain degree injurious. If I did not know by experience, that some men pass their whole time in doing nothing, I should not think it possible for any being, superior to Monsieur Descartes' automatons, to squander away, in absolute idleness, one single minute of that small portion of time which is allotted ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... French materialism, was not only a struggle against the existing political institutions and against the existing religion and theology, but equally an open and outspoken campaign against all metaphysics, especially that of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibnitz. Metaphysics was confronted with philosophy, just as Feuerbach, in his first decisive stand against Hegel, opposed sober philosophy to drunken speculation. The metaphysics of the seventeenth century, ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... the villages on the way, dwelt in 1650-51 Benedict Spinoza, the philosopher, and there he wrote his abridgement of the Meditations of Descartes, his master in philosophy, who had for a while lived close by at Endegeest. Spinoza, who was born at Amsterdam in 1632, died in 1677. His house at Rynsburg, which he shared with a Colleginat (one of a sect of Remonstrants who had their headquarters there) is now a Spinoza ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... their pay, to remember its place. Hobbes in his time was a friend of, and, it is said, a translator for, Lord Bacon; and Ben Jonson, that ripe scholar, revised his sound translation of "Thucydides." He sat at the feet of Galileo and by the side of Gassendi and Descartes. While in Fetter Lane he associated with Harvey, Selden, and Cowley. He talked and wrangled with the wise men of half Europe. He had sat at Richelieu's table and been loaded with honours by Cosmo de Medici. The laurels Hobbes won in the schools he lost on Parnassus. His translation ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... agreed upon. Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting it either in revelation, the consensus gentium, the instincts of the heart, or the systematized experience of the race. Others make the perceptive moment its own test,—Descartes, for instance, with his clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God; Reid with his 'common-sense;' and Kant with his forms of synthetic judgment a priori. The inconceivability of the opposite; the capacity ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... supposed. When we look back upon history, the world has gone through many similar crises before. The discoveries of Darwin and the philosophies of Mill or Hegel do not mark a greater relative advance than the discoveries of Newton and the philosophies of Descartes and Locke. These latter certainly had an effect upon theology. At one time they seemed to shake it to its base; so much so that Bishop Butler wrote in the Advertisement to the first edition of ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... Gustave Trouve is taken from a small volume devoted to an account of his labors recently published by M. Georges Dary. M. Trouve, who may be said to have had no ancestors from an electric point of view, was born in 1839 in the little village of Haye-Descartes. He was sent by his parents to the College of Chinon, whence he entered the Ecole des Arts et Metiers, and afterward went to Paris to work in the shop of a clock-maker. This was an excellent apprenticeship for our future electrician, since it is in small works that electricity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... are glad when we are not glad, or sorry when we are not sorry, or hopeful when in despair; and to pretend that we can possibly be conscious of willing when we are not willing, would be as absurd as to meet the cogito, ergo sum of Descartes, with the reply that, perhaps, we do not really think, but ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... leads from Leiden to Katwyk-aan-Zee passes the houses of Descartes and Spinoza; and altogether the short journey by water did not lack interest, for Katwyk has become a colony of artists. Once there, we walked to the sluice where the Rhine seeks its grave in the North Sea; and as it happened that the tide was high, with ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... Investigator Strait became Detroit de Lacepede; and his Backstairs Passage, Detroit de Colbert. To-day the Terre Napoleon charts look like a partial index to the Pantheon and Pere Lachaise. Laplace, Buffon, Volney, Maupertuis, Montaigne, Lannes, Pascal, Talleyrand, Berthier, Lafayette, Descartes, Racine, Moliere, Bernadotte, Lafontein, Condillac, Bossuet, Colbert, Rabelais, D'Alembert, Sully, Bayard, Fenelon, Voltaire,* (* Voltaire's name is on the Terre Napoleon sectional chart, but it seems to have been crowded ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... rightly) of two dogs, the one a house-dog and the other a hunting-dog. For by long training it could be brought about, that the house-dog should become accustomed to hunt, and the hunting-dog to cease from running after hares. To this opinion Descartes not a little inclines. For he maintained, that the soul or mind is specially united to a particular part of the brain, namely, to that part called the pineal gland, by the aid of which the mind is enabled to feel all the movements which are set ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... of feelings and mental processes, of free argument upon institutions and government. In relation to knowledge, it is the spirit of science, and the study of science, which is the essential intellectual fact in modern history, dates from just this time, from Bacon and Newton and Descartes. In relation to literature, it is the spirit of criticism, and criticism in England is the creation of the seventeenth century. The positive temper, the attitude of realism, is everywhere in the ascendant. The sixteenth century made voyages of discovery; ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... known function, so Descartes declared it to be the seat of the soul. 'There is nothing in here. Let us put something in,' and he put in the idea of the soul. That ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... be true, what, it may be asked, is the agency that causes the dendrites to contract or the neuroglia cells to expand? Is there really a soul sitting aloof in the pineal gland, as Descartes held? When a man like Lord Brougham can at any moment shut himself away from the outer world and fall asleep, does his soul break the dendritic contacts between cell and cell; and when he awakes, does it make contacts and switch the impulses evoked by sense ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... philosophising and make facts bend to systems, instead of establishing systems upon facts. The grand and consistent theory of Newton will be placed upon the same footing as the wild and eccentric hypotheses of Descartes. In short, if the laws of nature are thus fickle and inconstant, if it can be affirmed and be believed that they will change, when for ages and ages they have appeared immutable, the human mind ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... to the expression material universe, since, as they tell us "Matter is (though it may seem paradoxical to say so) the less important half of the material of the physical universe."[29] And even Mr. Huxley, though in a different sense, assures us, with Descartes, "that we know more of mind than we do of body; that the immaterial world is a firmer reality than ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... atomist, imagined a kind of vortices in the heavens, which he borrowed from Anaxagoras, and possibly suggested to Descartes. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... had so exhausted the subject that the most intelligent men saw how little was to be gained by pursuing further those lines of thought. The twelfth century had already reached the point where the seventeenth century stood when Descartes renewed the attempt to give a solid, philosophical basis for deism by his celebrated "Cogito, ergo sum." Although that ultimate fact seemed new to Europe when Descartes revived it as the starting-point of ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... a new light was struck by Harriott and Descartes, with their contemporaries, or immediate predecessors, and the restoration of ancient geometry, aided by the modern invention of algebra, placed the science of mechanism on the philosophic throne. How widely ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... atavism, and is an unmistakable evidence of degeneration. Lombroso gives a long list of the men of genius who were celibates. I will mention a few of those with whom the English-speaking world is most familiar: Kant, Newton, Pitt, Fox, Beethoven, Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Gray, Dalton, Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Lamb, Bentham, Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, Reynolds, Handel, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Schopenhauer, Camoens, and Voltaire. La Bruyere says of men of genius: "These men have ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... of Voltaire's own self, and therefore all the welcomer to him; delineated always with a kind of mockery, but with evident love. What excellences are in England, thought Voltaire; no Bastille in it, for one thing! Newton's Philosophy annihilated the vortexes of Descartes for him; Locke's Toleration is very grand (especially if all is uncertain, and YOU are in the minority); then Collins, Wollaston and Company,—no vile Jesuits here, strong in their mendacious mal-odorous stupidity, despicablest yet most dangerous of creatures, to check freedom of thought! ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... Robert Burns a ploughman, Keats a druggist, Thomas Carlyle a mason, Hugh Miller a stone mason. Rubens, the artist, was a page, Swedenborg, a mining engineer. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Ben Johnson was a brick layer and worked at building Lincoln Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket. Jeremy Taylor was a barber. Andrew Johnson was a tailor. Cardinal Wolsey was a butcher's son. So were Defoe and Kirke White. Michael ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... listless and unobliging individual." But the sojourner for a day will probably not notice this, and, if he should, must simply make allowance, and think with Henry James of the other memories of "this land of Rabelais, Descartes, and Balzac; of good dinners, good company, and good houses." To link the city still closer with letters, the first printing-press in Touraine was set up here in 1496. Nicolas Jensen, famed as the foremost Venetian ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... instance, maintains that the sensation of any object is produced by a perpetual succession of copies, images, or counterfeits, streaming off from the object to the organ of sensation. Descartes, too, has explained the matter ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... still put forth in fantastic books, but have never come to practical result. Nor were these all the steps towards theoretical perfectibility which this community had made. It had been the sober belief of Descartes that the life of man could be prolonged, not, indeed, on this earth, to eternal duration, but to what he called the age of the patriarchs, and modestly defined to be from 100 to 150 years average length. Well, even this dream of sages was here fulfilled—nay, more than fulfilled; for the vigour ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... are critics, few critics are philosophers, and few philosophers look with equal care on both sides of a question.—W. S. LANDOR in HOLYOAKE'S Agitator's Life, ii. 15. Introduire dans l'histoire, et sans tenir compte des passions politiques et religieuses, le doute methodique que Descartes, le premier, appliqua a l'etude de la philosophie, n'est-ce pas la une excellente methode? n'est-ce pas meme la meilleure?—CHANTELAUZE, Correspondant, 1883, i. 129. La critique historique ne sera jamais populaire. Comme elle est de toutes les sciences la plus delicate, la ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... that misled for so many centuries those who accepted the new versions of Christianity that issued out of the Reformation. The second was the mechanistic system, or systems, the protagonist of which was Descartes. If, as I believe, Calvinism was un-Christian, the materialistic philosophies that have gone on from the year 1637, were anti-Christian. As the power of Christianity declined through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism played a less and less important part, while the ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... impressions I received from this initial contact were an awareness of self and a recognizance of identity—the concept of cogito ergo sum came through quite clearly. I wonder what Descartes would think of an alien intelligence quoting his dogma.... I think it is animal, despite the absence of animal life in this area. The thought patterns are quick and flexible. And they have been increasing in power and precision at an appreciable rate. I am sure that it is aware of me. I ...
— The Issahar Artifacts • Jesse Franklin Bone
... 'have its course.' Nor have we fared better under the common daylight, for pure reason has notoriously made but light of practical reason, and has been made but light of in its turn, from that morning when Descartes discovered that he could think better in his bed than out of it; nor needed I original thought to discover, being so late of the school of Morris, that machinery had not separated from handicraft wholly for the world's good; ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... and Marchioness di Barolo and Silvio Pellico. Isabel Fenwick and Wordsworth. Harriet Martineau and Channing. Lucy Aikin and Channing. Frances Power Cobbe and Theodore Parker. Friendships of Women and their Tutors. Zenobia and Longinus. Countess of Pembroke and Daniel. Princess Elizabeth and Descartes. Caroline of Brunswick and Leibnitz. Lady Jane Grey and Elmer. Elizabeth Robinson and Middleton. Hester Salusbury and Dr. Collier. Blanche of Lancaster and Chaucer. Venetia Digby and Ben Jonson. Countess of Bedford and Ben Jonson. Countess Ranelagh and Milton. Duchess of Queensbury ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... of necessity with the responsibility of man. Section II. The manner in which Hobbes, Collins, and others, endeavour to reconcile necessity with free and accountable agency. Section III. The sentiments of Descartes, Spinoza, and Malebranche, concerning the relation between liberty and necessity. Section IV. The views of Locke, Tucker, Hartley, Priestley, Helvetius, and Diderot, with respect to the relation between liberty ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... not forget, that the illustrious Descartes, though he believed, that the mind has absolute power over its actions, strove to explain human emotions by their primary causes, and, at the same time, to point out a way, by which the mind might ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... the advance of thought—the conviction of the dignity and worth of the individual. This thought was the keynote of the Reformation. The Enlightenment, with its appeal to reason, as alike in all men, gave support to the idea of equality. Descartes claimed it as the philosophical basis of man's nature. Rousseau and Montesquieu were among its most valiant champions. Kant made it the point of departure for the enforcement of human right and duty. Fichte but elaborated Kant's view when he contended for 'the ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... means of organic modification, should lend themselves with alacrity to the task of getting rid of thought and feeling from all share in the direction and governance of the world. Professor Huxley, as usual, was among the foremost in this good work, and whether influenced by Hobbes, or Descartes, or Mr. Spalding, or even by the machine chapters in "Erewhon" which were still recent, I do not know, led off with his article "On the hypothesis that animals are automata" (which it may be observed is the exact converse of the hypothesis that automata are ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... the most complete and continuous expression of mystical thought and inspiration. Naturally, because it has ever been the habit of the English race to clothe their profoundest thought and their highest aspiration in poetic form. We do not possess a Plato, a Kant, or a Descartes, but we have Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Browning. And further, as the essence of mysticism is to believe that everything we see and know is symbolic of something greater, mysticism is on one side the poetry of life. For poetry, also, consists in finding resemblances, and universalises the ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... men have more than once led to mistaken affirmations of facts; and the most illustrious scientist that ever lived can hardly claim infallibility in matters of opinion. A distinguished philosopher and vivisector of three hundred years ago, Rene Descartes, put forth the theory that animals, being without souls, cannot suffer pain, and that their cries under vivisection were simply as the whirring of wheels in an intricate piece of machinery. We can easily imagine a modern follower of Descartes declaring, as ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... on Method, by Descartes, preceded by the Novum Organum of Bacon, and followed by the ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... not satisfactory, she promptly hid herself under the bed, and from that refuge she could not be induced to stir during the whole of the day. People who are not accustomed to live with animals, and who, like Descartes, regard them as mere machines, will think that I lend unauthorized meanings to the acts of the 'volatile' and the 'quadruped,' but I have only faithfully translated their ideas into human language. The next day Madame Theophile plucked up courage ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... periodical convulsions. Hesper, in answer, exhibits the great distinction between the ancient and modern state of the arts and of society. Crusades. Commerce. Hanseatic League. Copernicus. Kepler. Newton, Galileo. Herschel. Descartes. Bacon. Printing Press. Magnetic Needle. Geographical discoveries. Federal system in America. A similar system to be extended over the whole earth. Columbus desires a ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... of feeling that he is French to the core. No part of his admirable country is more characteristically national. Normandy is Normandy, Burgundy is Burgundy, Provence is Provence; but Touraine is essentially France. It is the land of Rabelais, of Descartes, of Balzac, of good books and good company, as well as good dinners and good houses. George Sand has somewhere a charming passage about the mildness, the convenient quality, of the physical conditions of central France—"son climat souple ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... sort of exertion, to make it keen and flexible." But the best way to encompass this is to feed the mind on ideas, and ideas are not produced every day, nor for that matter every year, and luckily all ideas have not the same value. There are the ideas of Taine, of Rousseau, of Voltaire, of Descartes, of Montaigne, of Ficino, of Petrarch, of Dante, of Cicero, of Aristotle, of Plato; and in a moment I have run the gamut of all the centuries of our Western civilization. Who will tell me which ideas we shall need most tomorrow? Evidently, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... great geometer, not in the same class as those that contributed to the progress of science with great discoveries, like Descartes, Newton, but certainly ranked among the geometers, whose works display a genius ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... which we are concerned, the seventeenth century centres round Descartes, whom an English admirer described as "the grand secretary of Nature." [Footnote: Joseph Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatising, p. 211, 64] Though his brilliant mathematical discoveries were the sole permanent contribution he made to knowledge, though his metaphysical and physical systems are only of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Descartes, seduced at an early age by the allurements of gambling, managed at length to overcome the evil, presenting examples of reformation—which proves that this mania is not absolutely incurable. Descartes became a gamester in his seventeenth year; but it is said that the combinations ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... wisdom in that remark which Queen Christina of Sweden made, in her nineteenth year, about Descartes, who had then lived for twenty years in the deepest solitude in Holland, and, apart from report, was known to her only by a single essay: M. Descartes, she said, is the happiest of men, and his condition ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... were of the Jewish race, and the same might be said of nearly all the greatest men who have lived since the dawn of our civilization. Napoleon was not a Jew, nor was Shakespeare, nor Bacon, nor Sir Isaac Newton, nor Michael Angelo, nor Leonardo da Vinci, nor Galileo, nor Dante, nor Descartes, nor Moliere, nor Emerson, nor Abraham Lincoln, nor Goethe, nor Kant, nor even Machiavelli. Thrown on their own resources, what civilization were the Jews able to create? Whilst Egypt, Greece, and Rome have left immortal ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... of Spinosa, and Descartes, and other advocates of the 'Material system', (or, in more appropriate language, the 'Atheistical system!') it is admitted by all men not prejudiced, not biassed by sceptical prepossessions, that 'mind' is distinct from 'matter'. The mind of man, however, is involved in inscrutable darkness, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... thousand livres. Well, these twelve thousand livres are his civil list, and are as essential to him as the twelve millions of a king. Every one, from the highest to the lowest degree, has his place on the social ladder, and is beset by stormy passions and conflicting interests, as in Descartes' theory of pressure and impulsion. But these forces increase as we go higher, so that we have a spiral which in defiance of reason rests upon the apex and not on the base. Now let us return to your particular world. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... almost unknown world in which he had to live. Bacon, to us, at least, at this distance, who can only judge him from partial and imperfect knowledge, often seems to fall far short of what a man should be. He was not one of the high-minded and proud searchers after knowledge and truth, like Descartes, who were content to accept a frugal independence so that their time and their thoughts might be their own. Bacon was a man of the world, and wished to live in and with the world. He threatened sometimes retirement, but never with any very serious intention. In the Court was his element, and there ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... the governor to call up Descartes and Gassendi, with whom I prevailed to explain their systems to Aristotle. This great philosopher freely acknowledged his own mistakes in natural philosophy, because he proceeded in many things upon conjecture, as all men must do; and he found that Gassendi, who had ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... distinction between psychical and material phenomena is a distinction of a different order from all other distinctions known to philosophy, and it immeasurably transcends all others. The progress of modern discovery has in no respect weakened the force of Descartes's remark, that between that of which the differential attribute is Thought and that of which the differential attribute is Extension, there can be no similarity, no community of nature whatever. By no scientific cunning of experiment ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... by the widest contact with other minds. There are other ways of assuring this contact, and these should not be neglected; but only thru books can it approach universality both in space and in time. How else could we know exactly what Homer and St. Augustine and Descartes thought and what Tolstoi and Lord Kelvin and William James, we will say, are ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... show the Brownies have a hand in it even then. Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience. For myself - what I call I, my conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland unless he has changed his residence since Descartes, the man with the conscience and the variable bank-account, the man with the hat and the boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at the general elections - I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all, but a creature as matter of fact as ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not understand him now. If he were no more than what he is described in the book before us—if his metaphysics were 'miserable,' if his philosophy was absurd, and he himself nothing more than a second-rate disciple of Descartes—we can assure M. de Careil that we should long ago have heard the last ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... set bounds to wisdom, we find that we have shut something out. Wisdom is the free, active life of a growing and attaching soul. We must not only attach information to ourselves, we must assimilate it. Else we are like a crab which should drag about Descartes, or as an ocean sucker which should hug ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... university was then under the Puritan control of Dr. John Owen; but not even his effort to redeem the university from its reputation for intellectual laxity rescued it from the "wrangling and ostentation" of the peripatetic philosophy. Yet it was at Oxford that he encountered the work of Descartes which first attracted him to metaphysics. There, too, he met Pocock, the Arabic scholar, and Wallis the mathematician, who must at least have commanded his respect. In 1659 he accepted a Senior Studentship of his college, which he retained until he was deemed politically undesirable ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... circle of the salons which regulated literary opinion in Paris. For half a century past Frenchmen had been regarding with jealous attention the causes and effects of human passion, culminating, for the moment, in the treatise written by Descartes for the daughter of the Queen of Bohemia. The Jansenists and the Jesuits, the playwrights, the novelists, Hobbes and Spinoza, all pursued, along widely different paths, those illusive secrets of the human heart which had escaped the notice of earlier generations. But La Rochefoucauld reduced ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... dogmas of the Church. To purge the Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to the reason has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as yet by any means accomplished. On the one side Descartes and Bacon, Spinoza and Locke, are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the Renaissance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. The whole movement of the Reformation is a phase in that accelerated action ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... mischievously ask Deronda if they were not the books called "medicine for the mind." Then she repented of her sauciness, and when she was safe from observation carried up a miscellaneous selection—Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Butler, Burke, Guizot—knowing, as a clever young lady of education, that these authors were ornaments of mankind, feeling sure that Deronda had read them, and hoping that by dipping into them all in succession, with ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... as well as mathematicians, and it is not to be wondered at that they were able to do so for a time. But the really striking fact is surely that Greek mathematics became sterile in a comparatively short time, and that no further advance was made till the days of Descartes and Leibniz, with whom philosophy and mathematics once ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... and his new name stood for peace or blessing, just as the other had, being essentially the same as our word benediction. The man's purpose was firm. To perfect himself in Latin, he began a study of Descartes' "Meditations," and this led to proving the Cartesian philosophy by a geometrical formula. In his quiet home among the simple Mennonites, five miles from Amsterdam, there gradually grew up around him a body of students ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... had, however, the pleasure to think that two of the principal persons of my company stood well with either one or another party. The Cardinal de Lenoncourt had been thought to favour the Huguenot party, and M. Descartes, brother to the Bishop of Lisieux, was supposed to have the Spanish interest at heart. I communicated our difficult situation to the Princesse de Roche-sur-Yon and Madame de Tournon, who, considering that we could not reach La Fere in less ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... of physical speculation, but believed in the certainty of moral truths. He knew that there was a reality in justice, in friendship, in courage. Like Job, he reposed on consciousness. He turned his attention to what afterwards gave immortality to Descartes. To the scepticism of the Sophists he opposed self-evident truths. He proclaimed the sovereignty of virtue, the universality of moral obligation. "Moral certitude was the platform from which he would survey the universe." It ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Ignorance gives way to opinionated and current error,—a greater foe to learning than ignorance itself. A Socrates is thus led to declare that consciousness of ignorance is the beginning of effective love of wisdom, and a Descartes to say that science is ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... individualism has had the freest play, and we are not likely to lose all that it has given us. Yet as soon as it was achieved the more distinguished spirits in every country began to feel the need of counterbalancing it. The history of the movement may be said to begin with Descartes, who in 1629 wrote to his friend Mersenne that it would be possible to construct an artificial language which could be used as an international medium of communication. Leibnitz, though he had solved the question for himself, writing some of his works in Latin and others in French, was yet all his ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... one must make, if he is to propound any doctrine whatsoever, even if that doctrine be that no doctrine can be valid; it is the presupposition that knowledge is possible, and that truth can be known. And this presupposition fills, for modern philosophy, the place of the Cogito ergo sum of Descartes. It is the starting-point ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... what were called the principles of agriculture, he found them involved in obscurity; he went to the book of Nature for instruction, and commenced, like Descartes, with doubting everything. He condemns the Roman husbandry as fettered by superstitions, and gives a piquant sneer at the absurd rhetoric and verbosity of Varro.[G] Nor is he any more tolerant of Scotch superstitions. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... for half an hour on any one matter, especially if following the ideas of another person.[94] He began his morning's work, after an hour or two of dispersive chat, with the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes.[95] He found these authors in a condition of such perpetual contradiction among themselves, that he formed the chimerical design of reconciling them with one another. This was tedious, so he took up another method, on which he congratulated himself to the end of his life. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... arrived, and circulating like the vortices (or vortexes) of Descartes. Still I have a due care of the needful, and keep a look out ahead, as my notions upon the score of moneys coincide with yours, and with all men's who have lived to see that every guinea is a philosopher's stone, or at least his touch-stone. You will doubt me the less, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... proposition of its power to originate mind), and he at length fell back upon this question, which he delivered with an honourable heat of defiance and indignation: "Well, can you tell me any man of intellect, great in science or philosophy, who accepted the miraculous?" I said, "With pleasure. Descartes, Dr. Johnson, Newton, Faraday, Newman, Gladstone, Pasteur, Browning, Brunetiere—as many more as you please." To which that quite admirable and idealistic young man made this astonishing reply—"Oh, but of course they had to say ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... the more celebrated Academie francaise. A number of men of science had for some thirty years met together, first at the house of P. Marsenne, then at that of Montmort, a member of the Council of State, afterwards at that of Melchisedec Thevenot, the learned traveller. It included Descartes, Gassendi, Blaise and Etienne Pascal. Hobbes, the author of Leviathan, was presented to it during his visit to Paris in 1640. Colbert conceived the idea of giving an official status to this learned club. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... pretend to account for it either by the action of certain vortices, as Kepler and Descartes, or by some other principle of impulse or attraction, for it is most certain that these effects must proceed from the action of some force or other. This we will call by the general name of a centripetal force, as it is a force which is directed to some ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... does all modern philosophy mainly do? Since Descartes—and indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of his procedure—an ATTENTAT has been made on the part of all philosophers on the old conception of the soul, under the guise of a criticism of the subject and predicate conception—that is to say, an ATTENTAT on the fundamental ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... appropriating Vieta's rights, but they even describe the distinguished English mathematician as working on the ' Cartesian Method.' While the truth appears to be that Hariot's method in Algebra, though not published for more than thirty years after its invention, must date from a time when Descartes was scarcely four ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... example, must be thought of as inherent in the projectile itself, and that the retardation or ultimate cessation of that motion is due to the action of antagonistic forces. In other words, he had come to grasp the meaning of the first law of motion. It remained, however, for the great Frenchman Descartes to give precise expression to this law two years after Galileo's death. As Descartes expressed it in his Principia Philosophiae, published in 1644, any body once in motion tends to go on in a straight line, at a uniform rate of speed, forever. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... a poor, dissipated, or insolent man," and that he had everywhere seen "industry and modesty." Louis Napoleon proclaimed that in no other European country is there found so much innate good sense, justice, and reason as there is in Holland; Descartes gave the Hollanders the greatest praise a philosopher can give to a people when he said that in no country does one enjoy greater liberty than in Holland; Charles V. pronounced upon them the highest eulogy possible ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... Nicolas (1638-1715). Born in Paris. The works of Descartes drew him to philosophy. The famous dictum, "Malebranche saw all things in God," had reference to his treatise, De la Recherche de la Verite, first ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... attempt to explain embryonic development in terms commensurate with his time, and it embodies the same optimistic belief that the mechanism of embryogenesis lay accessible to man's reason and logical faculties that similarly led Descartes and Gassendi to comprehensive interpretations of embryonic development comprising a maximum of logic ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... Descartes, following Bacon, had much to do with the establishment of method, although he laid more stress upon deduction than upon induction. With Bacon he believed that there was need of a better method of finding out the truth than that of logic. He was strong in his refusal to recognize anything as true ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... discerned plenty of difficulties of another kind, and he took alarm. A fine manner is not the invariable outcome of noble feeling; and while no man at court had a nobler air than Racine, Corneille looked very much like a cattle-dealer, and Descartes might have been taken for an honest Dutch merchant; and visitors to La Brede, meeting Montesquieu in a cotton nightcap, carrying a rake over his shoulder, mistook him for a gardener. A knowledge of the world, when it is not sucked in ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Stukely, a parson, has accounted for it, and I think prettily, by electricity—but that is the fashionable cause, and every thing is resolved into electrical appearances, as formerly every thing was accounted for by Descartes's vortices, and Sir Isaac's gravitation. But they all take care, after accounting for the earthquake systematically, to assure you that still it was nothing less than a judgment. Dr. Barton, the rector of St. Andrews, was the only ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... father of cookery, as Descartes, of French philosophy. It is said that Gonthier, in less than ten years, invented seven cullises, nine ragouts, thirty-one sauces, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... who are so silly as to suppose it unbecoming a wise man to indulge in the common comforts of life, should be answered in the words of the French philosopher. "Hey—what, do you philosophers eat dainties?" said a gay Marquess. "Do you think," replied DESCARTES, "that God made ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... The mind that thinks the universe must be immeasurably greater than my own, but in so far as I too am able to think the universe, mine is one with it. All thinking starts with a paradox, even the famous saying of Descartes, "I think, therefore I am"; and my paradox seems at least as reasonable as any other, and has fewer difficulties to encounter than most. I start then with the assumption that the universe is God's thought about Himself, and that in so far as I am ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... announces himself as the 49th and last Emanuel: his immediate {94} predecessors were Emanuel Washington, Emanuel Newton, and Emanuel Galileo. He is to collect nations into one family. He knows the transmigrations of the whole human race. Thus Descartes became William III of England: Roger Bacon became Boccaccio. But Charles IX,[190] in retribution for the massacre of St. Bartholomew, was hanged in London under the name of Barthelemy for the murder of Collard: and many of the Protestants whom he killed as King of France were shouting ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... prejudices, made England the reverse of a pleasant retirement, for either Hobbes or his patrons; so, perceiving the outbreak of the Revolution, he emigrated to Paris. There in the enjoyment of the company of Gassendi and Descartes, with the elite of Parisian genius, he was for awhile contented and happy. Here he engaged in a series of mathematical quarrels, which were prolonged throughout the whole of his life, on the quadrature of the circle. Seven years after, he ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... arrive at the Pantheon until ten o'clock at night, for the day had not been sufficiently long for this triumph. The coffin of Voltaire was deposited between those of Descartes and Mirabeau,—the spot predestined for this intermediary genius between philosophy and policy, between the design and the execution. This apotheosis of modern philosophy, amidst the great events that agitated the public mind, was a convincing proof that the Revolution comprehended ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... also an attribute of the philosopher. The intellect of a Newton, too, leaps from the specific instance to the general law; every man, in proportion to his intelligence and insight, feels that the world is one; while Plato and Descartes play with the time and space world with all the grave ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... taught Spinoza the rudiments of the language that was to enable him to enter into the important current of modern ideas especially embodied in the philosophy of Descartes. Francis Van den Ende gave him a thorough technical, not literary, mastery of it. And Van den Ende taught Spinoza much more besides. He acquainted him with the literature of antiquity; he gave him a sound knowledge ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... could be arrested there, but as in the human soul, so in nature, all was instability, contradiction, reconstruction, and oblivion. This remains the empirical fact; and we need but to rescind the artificial division which Descartes has taught us to make between nature and life, to feel again the absolute aptness of Heraclitus's expressions. These were thought obscure only because they were so disconcertingly penetrating and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the brilliant circles of Paris for his books, his meditations, and for his immortal work, and was ridiculed by the gay triflers he relinquished. Harrington, to compose his Oceana, severed himself from the society of his friends, and was so wrapped in abstraction, that he was pitied as a lunatic. Descartes, inflamed by genius, abruptly breaks off all his friendly connexions, hires an obscure house in an unfrequented corner at Paris, and applies himself to study during two years unknown to his acquaintance. Adam Smith, after the publication of his first work, throws himself into a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Hawthorne, may be found in the following list: Homer, Aschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Theocritus, Plutarch; Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Tacitus; Dante, Tasso, Petrarch; Cervantes, Calderon, Camoens; Moliere, Racine, Descartes, Voltaire; Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kant; Swedenborg; Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, and perhaps Burns and ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... between MORE's and DESCARTES' (1596-1650) theories as to the nature of spirit is interesting. When MORE first read DESCARTES' works he was favourably impressed with his views, though without entirely agreeing with him on all points; but later the difference became accentuated. ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... impression in forming future character, when she has absolute power for weal or for woe over the immortal being. Locke, the philosopher, said, "Every child is born into the world with a mind like a piece of blank paper, and we may write thereon whatever we will;" but Descartes said, "Nay, nay; the child is born with all its possibilities. You can develop all you find there, but you cannot add genius or power." "Nascitur, non fit," although our learned blacksmith, Elihu Burritt, always reversed this motto. ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... two sciences of algebra and geometry, thus far single, each depending on its own resources, neither in consequence fully developed, as nothing of human or divine origin can be alone, were united, in the very beginning of this epoch, by Descartes. This philosopher first applied the algebraic analysis to the solution of geometrical problems; and in this brilliant discovery lay the germ of a sudden growth of interest in the pure mathematics. The breadth and facility of these solutions added a new charm to the investigation of curves; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... hand if we find universal recognition of some fundamental truth, a common cogito ergo sum, or the like, acknowledged by all philosophers, we have made a discovery as satisfactory in its way as is acceptance of the complex system of philosophy offered by Plato or Descartes. There seems to be no real reason why it should not be quite as worth while to take a similar census of ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... into the sunset, he swept the horizon with his hand. "I have the all-round look. I say the Man of Calvary, He is before all, the sun; but I say Socrates, Plato, Jean Jacques—that is my name, and it is not for nothing, that—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Descartes, Locke, they are stars that go round the sun. It is the same light, but not the same sound. I reconcile. In me all comes together like the spokes to the hub of a wheel. Me—I am a Christian, I am philosophe, also. In St. Saviour's, my home in Quebec, if the crops are good, what ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Church:[167] "His views, both of life and death, are absolutely and entirely unaffected by the fact of his profession to believe the Gospel." That profession, indeed, partakes rather obviously of the nature of his other formal salutes[168] to the Church, which are such as Descartes felt it prudent to make in a later generation. His profession of fidelity to Catholicism, again, is rather his way of showing that he saw no superiority of reasonableness in Protestantism, than the expression of any real conformity to Catholic ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... look in the unmoving eyes of the spectre forbade the idea of anything supernatural; but for all that, in the brief space between his dreaming and waking life, the young man's judgment remained philosophically suspended, as Descartes advises. He was, in spite of himself, under the influence of an unaccountable hallucination, a mystery that our pride rejects, and that our imperfect science ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... a natural mistake for the student of seventeenth-century thought to underestimate the tenacity of scholastic Aristotelianism. Descartes, we all know, was reared in it, but then Descartes overthrew it; and he had done his work and died by the time that Leibniz was of an age to philosophize at all. We expect to see Leibniz starting on his shoulders and ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... humanists as the supreme heresy of free thought. He said that philosophy was only the shadow and revelation the substance. "Nor is it reasonable," said he, "that the divine will should be made the subject of controversy with us." Zwingli, anticipating Descartes's "finitum infiniti capax non est," stated that our small minds could not grasp God's plan. Oecolampadius, dying, said that he wanted no more light than he then had—an instructive contrast to Goethe's last words: "Mehr Licht!" Even Bacon, either from prudence or conviction, said that theological ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith |
