"Descartes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wrong; and the commonest knowledge of our wild world suffices to show any reasoning man the gravity of the error propounded in my quotation. As we study the history of the frivolous race of men, it sometimes seems hard to disbelieve the theory of Descartes. The great Frenchman held that man and other animals are automata; and, were it not that such a theory strikes at the root of morals, we might almost be tempted to accept it in moments of weakness, when the riddle of the unintelligible earth weighs heavily on ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... not seem to suffer either! Out with your cards, pipes, and dice. . . (All begin spreading out the games on the drums, the stools, the ground, and on their cloaks, and light long pipes): And I shall read Descartes. ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... 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 the discussion had lasted some minutes, Tom ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... the body—but all religious, and at least the older philosophical thought, generally agrees that the existence of such a soul is a self-evident fact, needing no proofs. Many regard the statement of Descartes: "I think, therefore I am," as a logical proof of the existence of an immaterial soul, and others hold that the self-consciousness of every human being is sufficient proof that the Ego, or "I," is a something immaterial, ruling the material body which it inhabits. ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... 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 do men say? ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as 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. ...
— Analytical Studies • 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 climbing on from there. ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... material idealism—is the theory which declares the existence of objects in space without us to be either () doubtful and indemonstrable, or (2) false and impossible. The first is the problematical idealism of Descartes, who admits the undoubted certainty of only one empirical assertion (assertio), to wit, "I am." The second is the dogmatical idealism of Berkeley, who maintains that space, together with all the objects of which ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... the value of the history of philosophy in general, given at the start, is the more true of the history of modern philosophy, since the movement introduced by the latter still goes on unfinished. We are still at work on the problems which were brought forward by Descartes, Locke, and Leibnitz, and which Kant gathered up into the critical or transcendental question. The present continues to be governed by the ideal of culture which Bacon proposed and Fichte exalted to a higher level; we ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... whole fifteen centuries before it; that it did this good work by boldly observing and analysing facts; that this boldness toward facts increased in proportion as Europe became indoctrinated with the Jewish literature; and that, notably, such men as Kepler, Newton, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, in whatsoever else they differed, agreed in this, that their attitude towards Nature was derived from the teaching of the Jewish sages. I believe that we are not yet fully aware how much we owe to the Jewish ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... 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 more ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... did Laplace launch forward, like Kepler, like Descartes, like Leibnitz, like Buffon, into the region of conjectures. But then his conception was nothing less than a complete cosmogony. All the planets revolve around the sun, from west to east, and in planes only slightly inclined to each other. The satellites revolve ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 centre; ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... 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 monuments, what monuments has Palestine ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... proposed a still more "advanced" vraisemblance and decorum—psychological analysis tinged with cynicism rather than idealism; gallantry but against the background sometimes of the modern city; a plainer style; and only such matters as seemed to this student of Descartes and Locke to be entirely reasonable. Fielding's chapter in Tom Jones (IX, i) "Of Those Who Lawfully May, and of Those Who May Not, Write Such Histories as This" could be taken as an indication that he knew not only what Mlle. de Scudery thought were the accomplishments of the romancer ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... March 1596, and died at Stockholm on the 11th of February 1650. The house where he was born is still shown, and a mtairie about 3 m. off retains the name of Les Cartes. His family on both sides was of Poitevin descent. Joachim Descartes, his father, having purchased a commission as counsellor in the parlement of Rennes, introduced the family into that demi-noblesse of the robe which, between the bourgeoisie and the high nobility, maintained a lofty rank in French society. He had three children, a son who afterwards succeeded ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... ridiculed, contested for; sometimes partially tried, and 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 ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... 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 ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... choose to exercise their organs of sight; not so with the theologian; he absolutely questions the existence of every other god but that which he himself has formed; which is questioned in its turn by his brother metaphysician. They are by no means disposed to admit the proofs offered by each other. Descartes, Paschal, and Doctor Samuel Clarke himself, have been accused of atheism by the theologians of their time. Subsequent reasoners have made use of their proofs, and even given them as extremely valid. Doctor Bowman published a work, in which he pretends all the proofs hitherto brought forward ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... Introduction to the present volume, Humboldt gives an historical review of the attempts to reduce the phenomena of the universe to a grand central unity, including the labors of Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Giordano Bruno, Descartes, and Sir Isaac Newton. The problem, as he conclusively shows, still remains to be solved. The present imperfect state of physical science offers insuperable obstacles to a speedy solution. New substances and new forces are constantly brought to light, nor ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... 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, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... must be, if the man find the gentler and purer duplicate of his own being in that mysterious, undefinable union which Shakspeares and day-labourers equally agree to call love; which Newton never recognizes, and which Descartes (his only rival in the realms of thought at once severe and imaginative) reduces into links of early association, explaining that he loved women who squinted, because, when he was a boy, a girl with that infirmity squinted at him from the other side of his father's ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 in England, Spinoza was excommunicated by the Amsterdam Rabbis. Spinoza ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... 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 ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Meanwhile the 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... whenever he chooses," 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 ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... is true that Napoleon had no longer any genius. No one is ignorant of the fact that letters sent to an exile by post very rarely reached him, as the police made it their religious duty to intercept them. This is no new fact; Descartes complained of it in his exile. Now David, having, in a Belgian publication, shown some displeasure at not receiving letters which had been written to him, it struck the royalist journals as amusing; and they derided ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... 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 quite clearly and distinctly to be true. Whatever he could bring himself to doubt, he would doubt, ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... 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 ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... 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 of the contemporary fundamentals of physiology ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... furnished a good share of men of renown in France, as witness the departed Courier of piquant memory; Verville, author of Moyen de Parvenir, and others equally well known, among whom we will specially mention the Sieur Descartes, because he was a melancholy genius, and devoted himself more to brown studies than to drinks and dainties, a man of whom all the cooks and confectioners of Tours have a wise horror, whom they despise, and will not hear spoken of, and say, "Where does he live?" if his ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... from a chemist and a poet. The truth is, that the collection of the materials of this history was the labour of several persons, who have not all been discovered. It has been ascertained that Ben Jonson was a considerable contributor; and there was an English philosopher from whom Descartes, it is said even by his own countrymen, borrowed largely—Thomas Hariot, whom Anthony Wood charges with infusing into Rawleigh's volume philosophical notions, while Rawleigh was composing his History of the World. But if Rawleigh's pursuits ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... died shortly after Delsarte, being lessened, and conscientious and patient study having fed the flame in that vast brain, we might have obtained affirmations of a new order. And Delsarte might have met with thinkers like Leibnitz, Descartes and Jean Reynaud, on that height where religion is purged of superstition and fanaticism, philosophy set free from ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... development of all his powers. This life or vital force is to the singer a definite, controllable power. "Various terms have been applied to this mysterious force. Plato called it 'the soul of the world.' Others called it the 'plastic spirit of the world,' while Descartes gave it the afterward popular name of 'animal spirits.' The Stoics called it simply 'nature,' which is now generally changed to 'nervous principle.'" "The far-reaching results of so quiet and yet so tremendous a force may be seen in the lives of the men and women who have the mental acumen ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... 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. 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 into these studies to waste ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... philosophy of Descartes, in its general spirit and main features, entered as a permanent element into modern philosophy? Has Descartes contributed more to theology than to science? Is Descartes's proof of the existence of God valid? Is Descartes's ...
— Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Debate Index - Second Edition • Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
... hear you after supper, merry with Boileau, and with Racine,—not yet a traitor,—laughing over Chapelain, combining to gird at him in an epigram, or mocking at Cotin, or talking your favourite philosophy, mindful of Descartes. Surely of all the wits none was ever so good a man, none ever made life so ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... cut down trees to reach their fruit, these judges of Bruno destroyed the tree whose seeds were already strewn broadcast over the world. They hushed forever the voice whose echoes are not yet stilled,—echoes that resound in the cautious Meditations of Descartes, that rise from peak to peak of the majestic method of the great Spinoza, who was no less a martyr because reputation and not life was the forfeit of his earnestness; and that vibrate with thrilling sweetness ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... more advanced age are still to be disposed of, and the task of devising an institution will not be easy; because, perhaps a Collot d'Herbois or a Duhem is not satisfied with the system which perfectioned the genius of Montesquieu or Descartes. Change, not improvement, is the object—whatever bears a resemblance to the past must be proscribed; and while other people study to simplify modes of instruction, the French legislature is intent on rendering them as difficult and complex as possible; ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... when he reasons. For even supposing that in man, and in man only, psychosis is superadded to neurosis—the neurosis which is common to both man and animal gives their reasoning processes a fundamental unity. But Descartes's position is open to very serious objections, if the evidence that animals feel is insufficient to prove that they really do so. What is the value of the evidence which leads one to believe that one's fellow-man feels? The only evidence ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... best-known work, is to discover the ultimate principle of knowledge. This he finds in the sense we have of our own existence and of what we feel within ourselves. He thus takes substantially the same ground as Descartes, but he rejected the a priori method. In order to know what exists distinct from the self, "common sense" is necessary. Common sense he defined as "that disposition which nature has placed in all or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Descartes in the sixteenth century prepared the way for Locke, Newton and Leibnitz; and his system, although now little used, was really the foundation of what followed. He is said to have given new and fresher ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... St. Genevieve, and taught the Humanities in several religious houses of his order. He died, subprior of the Abbey of St. Jean de Cartres, in 1680. He wrote, besides his Treatise upon Epic Poetry, a parallel between the philosophies of Aristotle and Descartes, which appeared a few months earlier (in 1674) with less success. Another authority was Father Bouhours, of whom see note on p. 236, vol. i. [Footnote 4 of No. 62.] Another was Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. called by Voltaire the most universal genius of his age. He ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... it is of the poetic temper, is 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 sportiveness ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Descartes was certainly not much inferior to Newton as a mathematician, and thousands insist that he was his superior; yet he was not a Christian. Euclid, if I remember right, was not a Christian, and yet he had quite a turn ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... nations; and infers future and 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 ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... this was the age when the vast modern movement of inquiry and investigation was beginning. Bacon was laying in England the foundations of philosophy, casting with his prophetic intelligence the horoscope of unborn sciences. Descartes was opening new vistas of thought to the world. But in Spain, while the greatest names of her literature occur at this time, they aimed at no higher object than to amuse their betters. Cervantes wrote Quixote, but he died in a monk's hood; ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... those who compose it? What is practicable in the actual condition in which a given state finds itself at a given time? It seems too easy a solution of our problems to seek dogmatic answers to our questionings by having recourse to the "natural light," that ready oracle of the philosopher, Descartes. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... On that subject. One 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 sensible, or at least honest divine, upon the occasion. When ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... 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
... conception of the neurogram. In psycho-analytic work a more vague use of "dream material" is preferred and it is only by good luck that the real settings-of-ideas come into account. Jung, no less than Freud, has forgotten that philosophy has become mechanistic since Descartes'[21] famous year of 1637, and Jung would throw us back to the early seventeenth century, with his energic conception of the Libido, or the Ur-libido, now called Horme and sometimes merely elan vital. And this, fifty years after ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Montaigne could not give to his irresolute and doubtful mind he stamped upon the tongue; it came out in his Essays supple, free, and bold; he had made the first decisive step towards the formation of the language, pending the advent of Descartes and the great ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... 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 learning and astuteness, ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... of being. We are compelled, then, to end in a dualism whose terms we know perfectly well to be false, but which, being for us the condition of the truth, forces itself irresistibly upon us; we are compelled, in short, to commence, like Descartes and the human race, with the ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... 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, we ...
— Sophist • Plato
... high-priests of the sect. Of so much importance was he considered, that Keppler and Gassendi thought it necessary to refute him; and the latter wrote a complete examination of his doctrine. 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 shewed the absurdity of the brothers of the Rose-cross in general, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... from the Greek—physician). This medical theory—as is the case with many scientific theories-was borrowed from another branch of science. The seventeenth century, the age of Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz, Rene Descartes, and other giants of physical science, was a period of remarkable progress in the field of physics. It is not surprising then that theorists in the field of medicine, noting the truths discovered by conceiving of nature as a great machine functioning according to laws that could be expressed ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... 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 ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... theories 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... Vattel, the author of the 'Rights of Nations,' was a practical diplomatist, and a first-rate man of business. Rabelais was a physician, and a successful practitioner; Schiller was a surgeon; Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon, Camoens, Descartes, Maupertius, La Rochefoucauld, Lacepede, Lamark, were soldiers in the early ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... not remain altogether negative. The new movement extended itself to Metaphysics, and under the leadership of Descartes a resolute effort was made to reform Philosophy on ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... remembering localities, in Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Tycho, Descartes, Sir Walter Scott, and Captain ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... procession did not 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 ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... 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 Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... observed to a friend, 'that he was thought by some to have a soft head, but he thanked God he had a soft heart.' In the heat of the Rebellion, the Republicans spared More, although he had refused to take the Covenant. Campbell says of him, 'He corresponded with Descartes, was the friend of Cudworth, and, as a divine and a moralist, was not only popular in his own time, but has been mentioned with admiration both by Addison and Blair.' One is rather amused at the latter ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... word is used in two main senses: (1) in ethics, for the view that man is not 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 certain physical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... was a common fame [report] that Pythagoras was a disciple of the Prophet Ezekiel." The Cambridge Platonists were anxious, not only to show this dependence of Greek upon Hebraic thought, but they went on to argue that Moses taught, in allegory, the natural philosophy of Descartes. More calls Platonism the soul, and Cartesianism the body, of his own philosophy, which he applies to the explanation of the Law of Moses. "This philosophy is the old Jewish-Pythagorean Cabbala, ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... and to criticize some of the mischievous ideas which arise from Parallelism. There is the idea of a brain-soul, of a spot where the soul lives or where the brain thinks—which we have not quite abandoned since Descartes named the pineal gland as the seat of the soul. Then there is the false idea that all causality is mechanistic and that there is nothing in the universe which is not mathematically calculable. There is the confusion of representations and of things. There is the false notion ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... Propagation of Light Law of Incidence and Reflection Sterility of the Middle Ages Refraction Discovery of Snell Partial and Total Reflection Velocity of Light Roemer, Bradley, Foucault, and Fizeau Principle of Least Action Descartes and the Rainbow Newton's Experiments on the Composition of Solar Light His Mistake regarding Achromatism Synthesis of White Light Yellow and Blue Lights produce White by their Mixture Colours of Natural Bodies Absorption Mixture of Pigments contrasted ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... of two convex lenses, by which objects are seen inverted. Kepler also discovered the important fact, that spherical surfaces were not capable of converging rays to a single focus, and he conjectured, what Descartes afterwards proved, that this property might be possessed by lenses having the figure of some of the sections of the cone. The total reflection of light at the second surface of bodies was likewise studied by Kepler, and he determined that the total reflection commenced when ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... in the presence of these facts, of the metaphysics and cosmogonies that have succeeded each other for two thousand years? What of all the theories, from Ptolemy to Copernicus, from Copernicus to Galileo, Descartes and his zones, Leibnitz and his monads, Wolf and his fire forces, Maupertuis and his intelligent elements, Broussais, who, in his anatomical lectures, has oftener than once shown to his pupils, on the point of his scalpel, the source ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... more than it does | the turbulent Paracelsus or the | unquiet and skittish Cornelius | Agrippa. The titanic bearing of the | Renaissance magus is now supplanted | by a classical composure similar to | that of the "conversations" of the | earliest Humanists. Also in Galileo's | DIALOGO and in Descartes's RECHERCHE | DE LA VERIT we find the same | familiar tone and style of | conversation in which [Descartes | wrote] "several friends, frankly and | without ceremony, disclose the best | of their thoughts to each other." ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... studied Locke for herself. Either he was right and all the others were wrong, or else there was no truth in any. Another philosopher professed to ground some points of his faith on certain principles of Descartes; the very next work she read proclaimed that Descartes never held any such principles, that the writer had altogether mistaken his views; whereupon up started another, who informed her that nobody knew what Descartes really did believe on the subject under discussion; ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... 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
... seventeenth century we find three men whose business it was, above all, to present and defend common sense in the natural sciences. The most eloquent and variedly persuasive of these was Lord Bacon. Then there was the young Descartes trying to shake himself loose from his training in a Jesuit seminary by going into the Thirty Years' War, and starting his intellectual life all over by giving up for the moment all he had been taught. Galileo had committed an offense of a grave character by discussing in the ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... analysis, and that the method of science can anticipate science. In entertaining such a vision of a priori knowledge he is sufficiently justified, or at least his meaning may be sufficiently explained by the similar attempts of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and even of Bacon himself, in modern philosophy. Anticipations or divinations, or prophetic glimpses of truths whether concerning man or nature, seem to stand in the same relation to ancient philosophy which hypotheses bear to modern inductive science. These 'guesses ...
— The Republic • Plato
... measure man's large scope by the gauge of their own ability and experience fall into such idiosyncrasy as is the fruitful mother of sects, abortive social schemes, and all the various brood of dwarfed life; but, for most men, the pressure of life itself, which compels them, like Descartes, doubting the world, to live as if it were real, corrects their original method of independence. They find that to use authority is the better part of wisdom, much as to employ men belongs to practical statecraft; and they learn the reasonable share ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... 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!" ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... either not looked into or had found the most unreadable, with a half-smiling wish that she could 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 her rapid understanding she might get a point ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... experiments. We may return again to the old mode of 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 will no longer have any incitements to inquiry, but must remain fixed in ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... mention the great atomic system taught by old Moschus before the siege of Troy; revived by Democritus of laughing memory; improved by Epicurus, that king of good fellows; and modernized by the fanciful Descartes. But I decline inquiring, whether the atoms, of which the earth is said to be composed, are eternal or recent; whether they are animate or inanimate; whether, agreeably, to the opinion of Atheists, they were fortuitously aggregated, or, as the Theists ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... 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, however active, or no reach of ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... both parties. I 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 ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... of the land is at last contested, and we are saddened inexpressibly, that, from the elevation they have reached, these two peers of civilization can descend to practise the barbarism of war, and especially that the laud of Descartes, Pascal, Voltaire, and Laplace must challenge to bloody duel the laud of Luther, Leibnitz, Kant, ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... and we resign up our thoughts to the sound of words, rather than [fix them on settled, determined] ideas of things; I say these general maxims will serve to confirm us in mistakes; and in such a way of use of words, which is most common, will serve to prove contradictions: v.g. he that with Descartes shall frame in his mind an idea of what he calls body to be nothing but extension, may easily demonstrate that there is no vacuum, i.e. no space void of body, by this maxim, WHAT IS, IS. For the idea to which he annexes the name body, being bare extension, his knowledge that space ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke |
