in natural philosophy, though often very acute, are apt to wander far from the truth, in consequence of his defective acquaintance with the phenomena of nature. His "Centuries of Natural History" give abundant proof of this. He is, in all these inquiries, like one doubtfully, and by degrees, making out a distant prospect, but often deceived by the haze. And if we compare what may be found in the sixth, seventh, and eighth books De Augmentis, in the Essays, the History of Henry VII., and the various short treatises contained in his works on moral and political wisdom, and on human nature, from experience of which all such wisdom is drawn, with the Rhetoric, Ethics, and Politics of Aristotle, or with the historians most celebrated for their deep insight into civil society and human character-with Thucydides, Tacitus, Philip De Comines, Machiavel, Davila, Hume-we shall, I think, find that one man may almost be compared with all of these together" (Literature of Europe, vol. iii. p. 66).

Perhaps it is not too much to say with Dugald Stewart, that "in the whole history of letters, no other individual can be mentioned whose exertions have had so indisputable an effect in forwarding the intellectual progress of mankind" (Life of Reid, sec. 2; quoted also by Hallam).

It is not without emotion that we read in the last will of this great but unfortunate man, these touching words: "First, I bequeath my soul and body into the hands of God by the blessed oblation of my Saviour; the one at the time of my dissolution, the other at the time of my resurrection. For my burial I desire it may be in St. Michael's Church, near St. Albans: there was my mother buried. For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages" (Works, vol. iii. p. 677).

CHAPTER III.

RENÉ DESCARTES.

IN order rightly to estimate the man to whom, more than any other, belongs the honor of being the founder of modern philosophy, we must know something of the age to which he belonged, something of the man personally, something of his system, something of the impress and effect of the man and his system on other minds and ages.

§ 1.-THE AGE.

The close of the sixteenth century, and the beginning of the seventeenth, were a transition period in the history of philosophy and the progress of human thought. The philosophy of Aristotle, which, in one form or another, for two thousand years had held sway over the minds of men, keeping its throne and state amid all the commotions and changes of empire, itself unshaken and undisturbed by the rise and fall of nations, was now in its decadence, fast losing its hold upon the mind of the age. Through the whole sixteenth century, in fact, this process had been going on. Nothing in the history of mind is more remarkable than this prevalence, for so long a period, of the Scholastic philosophy. "For more than five centuries," says a somewhat too ardent eulogist of Descartes, "this philosopher-i. e., Aristotleattacked, proscribed, adored, excommunicated; always victor, dictated to the nations what they should believe." "From the age of Aristotle to that of Descartes, I perceive a desert of two thousand years, where original thought loses itself, as a river which perishes in the sands, or hides itself in the earth, and reappears, a thousand leagues away, under new skies and in another land."* If these state

* Eloge, par Thomas.

ments of the French eulogist are somewhat too bold and sweeping, as I must concede they are, they have nevertheless a basis of truth.

At the period of which we speak, the Scholastic philosophy, however, had lost its primal vigor, and was fast falling to decay. Men had come to distrust and disbelieve it, while as yet they had nothing better to accept in its stead. It stood like some old edifice of a former age, its glory dimmed, its columns fallen and shattered, but majestic in its ruin. There needed some one to clear away the rubbish, and lay the foundation of a newer and a better structure. The first principles of human knowledge were to be readjusted. A right method of investigation was needed; a right field. In both respects men had been led astray; seeking neither for the right things, nor in the right manner. The nations, waking from their long slumber, felt the need of an instructor. Something indeed had already been done in the way of discovery; the light was already dawning. Copernicus had announced the true theory of the earth's motion; Tycho Brahe and Kepler had given definitions in the science of astromony, and enlarged its domain; the telescope, by which, it has been eloquently said, man touches the extremities of creation, was already invented; and Galileo, going forth on voyages of discovery, had brought back strange tidings. Sufficient had been done, enough had been disclosed, to awaken and stimulate the minds of men. The materials were at hand for the most successful research, but the principle of order was wanting, the law and the lawgiver, to reduce to form and method the discordant elements.

Such, in brief, was the state of human learning at the close of the sixteenth century. In the language of Morell; "There needed some master mind, who should be daring enough to trample upon the sacredness of ancient and established authority, acute enough to show the true objects of all philosophy, and powerful enough to furnish a new

organum, and dig, as it were, a new channel, in which the philosophic spirit of the world should flow." Such a mind arose; two such, Bacon and Descartes, and after them, in the domain of human knowledge and philosophy, all things became new.

§. 2. THE MAN.

Born in 1596, of honorable parentage, in Touraine in France; his father, counsellor to the parliament of Brittany, his mother, the daughter of the LieutenantGeneral of Poitiers; a feeble and sickly child, giving promise of no long life; while yet a boy, noted for the liveliness of his imagination, and a peculiar inquisitiveness of mind, always seeking to know the causes of things, so that before he was yet nine years old he had acquired the title of the little philosopher. At the school of the Jesuits, where he was placed at the age of eight years, he showed a marked fondness for poetry and mathematics, which latter alone, of all the sciences, gave him entire satisfaction, as furnishing the evidence of its own assertions. At sixteen he finished his studies at the school, having learned not to think much of his own attainments, or those of his teachers. "The result, ordinarily," says one of his biographers, "of one's first studies, is to imagine that one knows everything. Descartes was already so far advanced as to see that he knew nothing.". We next find him at Paris, seeking in the gay and pleasure-loving city, occupation for his eager and restless mind. Breakingly off presently from these follies and dissipations, he shuts himself in entire seclusion in an obscure section of the city, and devotes himself exclusively for two years to the study of geometry, no one of his former companions knowing of his whereabouts. For the next twelve years we find him travelling in foreign parts, visiting, in the careful observation of men, the principal countries of Europe, spending often not a few months but years in one country before passing to another, sometimes bearing arms, and serving as common soldier, always pass

ing much time in seclusion and careful thought on the topics suggested by his observation of men and of nature. All this while, his mind was passing through those painful processes of doubt and struggle which laid the foundation of his own future system of philosophy. It was during this time also that he made those scientific observations among the Alps, which constituted in fact the material of his subsequent work on natural philosophy. At the age of thirty-three, he fixes his permanent residence in Holland, choosing that in preference to his native land, principally from the desire of escaping public notice and enjoying that solitude so congenial to his spirit and so favorable to his studies. Intrusting his secret to a single friend, who alone. knew his place of abode, changing often his residence as it became known, hiding himself now in the throng of some large town or city, now in the seclusion of some obscure hamlet, now in some building, that stood solitary in the fields or on the sea-shore, everywhere he sought retirement and gave himself to profound thought.

At the age of forty-one appeared his first work, scientific in its character, with an introductory treatise on the method of arriving at certainty in the investigation of truth; in other words, the famous "Discourse on Method," which laid the foundation of his fame and also of modern philosophy. Four years later appeared his second great work, entitled "The Meditations," the most strictly philosophical of all his works. His "Principia Philosophiæ " appeared in 1644, three years later, and is a complete system of Natural Philosophy. The work on the Passions, or Psychology, as we should now term it, followed five years later, and is the last of his principal works.

Some of these productions, especially the "Meditations," involved him in controversy with the principal theologians of the time, and these discussions, extending through a considerable part of his subsequent life, form not the least interesting part of his published writings.