"Descartes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... flower,—ah, if that be so, how tenfold the good 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 ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... understand the precise character of the piety of Jesus, we must forget all that is placed between the gospel and ourselves. Deism and Pantheism have become the two poles of theology. The paltry discussions of scholasticism, the dryness of spirit of Descartes, the deep-rooted irreligion of the eighteenth century, by lessening God, and by limiting Him, in a manner, by the exclusion of everything which is not His very self, have stifled in the breast of modern rationalism all fertile ideas of the ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... 13.] The dominion 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 ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... knowledge. He avows that it has been virtually acted on from the earliest period by all who have made any real contribution to science, and became distinctly present to the minds of speculative men from the time of Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo, whom he regards as collectively the founders of the Positive Philosophy. As he says, the knowledge which mankind, even in the earliest ages, chiefly pursued, being that which they most needed, was foreknowledge: "savoir, ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... 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 all live under ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... the Coleridgian ontology consists in the alteration of a single though a very important word in the well-known Cartesian formula. Cogito ergo sum had been shown by Hume to involve an illicit process of reasoning. Descartes, according to the Scottish sceptic, had no right to have said more than Cogito ergo cogitationes sunt. But substitute willing for thinking, convert the formula into Volo ergo sum, and it ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... 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 printer ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... taken from a small volume devoted to an account of his labors recently published by M. Georges Dary. M. Trouv, 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 cole 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... German 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 ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... such rational grounds of assent that they are as immovable as the pillars of heaven, or (to speak philosophically) as the great laws of Nature, by which, under God, the universe is sustained. Can you seriously think that because the hypothesis of your countryman Descartes, which was nothing but an ingenious, well-imagined romance, has been lately exploded, the system of Newton, which is built on experiments and geometry—the two most certain methods of discovering ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... frame of mind: he was going to persist in his study of the Latin language, 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 to whom he read his writings. The Cartesian philosophy swings around ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... completed yet. If we go back to the opening of the 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 ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... 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 ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... 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 ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... 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 in 1684. ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... 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 the ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... 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
... for something other than a life of politics, newspapers, and financial enterprise. They desire to know and love the best that is known, and they are willing to be poor and obscure, if they may but gain entrance into this higher world. "I shall ever consider myself," says Descartes, "more obliged to those who leave me to my leisure, than I should to any who might offer me the most honorable employments." This is the thought of every true student and lover of wisdom; for he feels that whatever a man's occupation may be, his business is to improve his mind ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... cookery, as Descartes, of French philosophy. It is said that Gonthier, in less than ten years, invented seven cullises, nine ragouts, thirty-one sauces, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... 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, 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 ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... 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. ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... 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
... But the chief danger, as we conceive, lies in those new, or at least newly organized, theories that have only recently received their full development in the Inductive and Scientific pursuits which constitute the peculiar glory of modern times; and which, commencing with the era of Bacon and Descartes, and gradually matured by Newton, Leibnitz, and their successors, have at length issued in the construction of a solid fabric of Science. To Theism there is no danger in Science, in so far as it is true, for all truth is self-consistent and harmonious; but there may be much danger in the use ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... less to propound a true and durable explanation, than to arrest by a bold and 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... 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 ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... morals." He knew the uncertainty 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 was ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... 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." But | there is besides, in Bacon, the quiet | confidence that comes ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... sit 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 ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... then, in the ages when the understanding had preserved the religious and spiritualist impressions, which prevailed from the time of Christ till that of Descartes, between faith and doubt, how could men help accounting for the mysteries of our nature otherwise than by divine interposition? Of whom but of God Himself could sages demand an account of an invisible creature so actively and so ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... 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 animated) ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... 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. He declares against wasteful and careless farming in a way that reminds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... 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 clause. That a man of More's massive learning, noble ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... set their hearts give no permanent satisfaction, and he cast about for some means by which to secure "a joy continuous and supreme to all eternity." I propose now, without attempting to connect or contrast Spinoza with Descartes or the Germans, to name some of those thoughts in his books by which he conceived he had attained ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... 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, we cannot trace this law of ...
— Sophist • Plato
... 1100-50, 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 his demonstration, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... the authority of a principal professor in one of the Royal Colleges of Paris. The case, very similar to that of Angelique Cottin, occurred in the month of December previous, in the person of a young girl, not quite fourteen years old, apprenticed to a colorist, in the Rue Descartes. The occurrences were quite as marked as those in the Cottin case. The professor, seated one day near the girl, was raised from the floor, along with the chair on which he sat. There were occasional ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... purely, or part of both. In like manner the Benthamite, who propounds happiness as the general end of human society, cannot prove this, as Newton could prove that gravity follows the inverse square of the distance; nor can his position be impugned in the way that Newton impugned the vortices of Descartes, by showing that they were at variance ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... opened it, read in it ten or twelve Greek verses, which absolutely cleared up the difficulty which had so long beset him; he awoke, and wrote down the verses he had seen at Stockholm. On the morrow, he wrote to M. Descartes, who was then in Sweden, and begged of him to look in such a place, and in such a division of the library, if the book, of which he sent him the description, were there, and if the Greek verses which he sent him were to be read ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... origin as 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. A number of chemists, physicians, anatomists ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and few philosophers look with equal care on both sides of a question.—W. S. LANDOR in HOLYOAKE'S Agitator's Life, ii. 315. 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 ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... and beneficent in its nature; it is made up of masses of facts slowly accumulated and then summarily presented, or in rapid succession. For the first time in history the sciences expand and affirm each other to the extent of providing, not, as formerly, under Galileo and Descartes, constructive fragments, or provisional scaffolding, but a definite and demonstrated system of the universe, that of Newton.[3101] Around this capital fact, almost all the discoveries of the century, either as ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... cart. On the approach of his friends, Mr. Ripley came forward and said, "Dr. Francis, this is really kind of you, to come such a distance to see an old fellow. You perceive I am occupied with the philosophy of 'de cart.'" This referred to some writings he had lately published on Descartes' philosophy, and made ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... of 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 impulse to mathematical and philosophical study than any other student, either ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... the elder Pascal became a centre of men of congenial intellectual tastes with himself, and his house a sort of rendezvous for the mathematicians and the physicists of the time. Among them were Descartes, Gassendi, Mersenne, Roberval, Carcavi, and Le Pailleur; and from the frequent reunion of these men is said to have sprung the Academy of Sciences founded in 1666. It is interesting to notice that it was into this same society that Hobbes was ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... 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 that ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... 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; and Lope de Vega was ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... 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 ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... movements which the vulgar call Joy, sadness, pleasure, pain, and love— The cause extrinsic and above.— Believe it not. What's this I hold? Why, sooth, it is a watch of gold— Its life, the mere unbending of a spring. And we?—are quite a different thing. Hear how Descartes—Descartes, whom all applaud, Whom pagans would have made a god, Who holds, in fact, the middle place 'Twixt ours and the celestial race, About as does the plodding ass From man to oyster as you pass— Hear how this author states the case 'Of all the tribes to being ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... curiosity, and the indomitable love of independence and singularity which are to be traced in every part of the Queen's character. She was a woman of powerful but ill-regulated mind, capable at one time of sharing in the speculations of Descartes or of applauding the exhortations of Whitelocke,—at another, of bowing to the spiritual bondage of Rome, and even of committing the brutal murder of Monaldeschi. The character of Cromwell pleased her by its adventurous exploits and its arbitrary tendency, and her reception of the English Embassy ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... It was more that of a man of science and learning than that of a clergyman. Beside Leighton and Flavel were placed Bacon and Descartes; dust lay upon John Newton's Sermons, while close by, rested in honoured, well-thumbed tatters, his great namesake, who read God's scriptures in the stars. In one corner by a large, unopened packet—marked "Religious Society's Tracts;" it ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... commenced by a 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
... the doctrine of Locke, through Descartes,[3] was also derived from Democritus. It was that all the sensible qualities of things, except position, shape, solidity, number and motion, were only ideas in us, projected and falsely regarded as lodged in things. In the things, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... core. No part of his admirable country is more characteristically national. Normandy is Normandy, Burgundy is Burgundy, Provence is Pro- vence; 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 charm- ing passage about the mildness, the convenient quality, of the physical conditions of central France, - "son climat souple et chaud, ses pluies abondantes et ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... arguments 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
... Luther to reconcile the scheme 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
... Sir Richard Blackmore's question as to what books he should read,—meaning medical books. "Read Don Quixote," was his famous answer. But Sydenham himself made medical books and may be presumed to have thought those at least worth reading. Descartes was asked where was his library, and in reply held up the dissected body of an animal. But Descartes made books, great books, and a great many of them. A physician of common sense without erudition is better than a learned one without common sense, but the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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 ...
— The Issahar Artifacts • Jesse Franklin Bone
... Descartes' little tract on Method is, like everything the lively and deep-souled Breton did, full of original ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... 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 ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the 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
... all goes to 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 is no story-teller at all, but a creature as matter of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Leibnitz do 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 ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... 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 something wrong ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... in modern 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
... interesting group of scholarly Collegiants who became very intimate friends of Baruch Spinoza, and who received from the Jewish philosopher a strong impulse toward mystical religion. Before they became acquainted with the young Spinoza, however, they had already received through Descartes a powerful intellectual awakening, {124} and had discovered that consciousness itself, when fully sounded, has its own unescapable evidence of God. It is not possible here to turn aside and study adequately ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... 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, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... their reading 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, 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
... through Paris on his way to Rheims, where he resided for some time; though the greater part of his three years' stay was spent at La Fleche, in frequent intercourse with the Jesuits of the famous college in which Descartes was educated. Here he composed his first work, the Treatise of Human Nature; though it would appear from the following passage in the letter to Cheyne, that he had been accumulating materials to that end for some ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... 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. We are disappointed. ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... worked 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 least outward respect for morality. To these results she largely contributed. ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... logical order. For while in logical order the two problems 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 ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... by ancestral descent, and the intermarriage of religious families, so strangely end in the production of children totally devoid of moral sense and religious sentiment—moral imbeciles in short."[245-1] From such considerations of the necessity of physical vigor to elevated thought, Descartes predicted that if the human race ever attain perfection it will be chiefly through the art of medicine. Not alone from emotions of sympathy did the eminent religious teachers of past ages maintain that the alleviation and prevention of suffering is the ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... residence of Barneveldt. Men like Diderot are the last 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 in different measures, owed ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Voigt on the manners and 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, &c., &c. &c. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... in spite of Professor Huxley's dictum, is contributing a good deal to the general doctrine of evolution; for though Descartes and Leibnitz may have thrown out hints pointing more or less broadly in the direction of evolution, some of which Professor Huxley has quoted, he has adduced nothing approaching to the passage from Buffon given above, either in respect of the clearness with which the conclusion intended ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... that he alone could set matters right. She 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 ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... becomes clear to us, that God exists necessarily, that He is omnipresent, and that all our conceptions involve in themselves the nature of God and are conceived through it. (5) Lastly, we see that all our adequate ideas are true. (6) Compare on this point the prolegomena to book, "Principles of Descartes's ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... all those operations which are performed by the nervous system of man 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' 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 ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... visit to the archbishop's palace, and a short stop at the museum, which attracted us less than the outdoor world on this pleasant day, we stopped at the Quai du Pont Neuf to look at the statues of Descartes and Rabelais, so picturesquely placed on each side of the Pont de Pierre. Retracing our steps by the Rue Nationale we strolled into the interesting old church of St. Julian, where we admired the vast nave of noble proportions and the beautiful stained glass. After ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... from form, essence from accident, and opening by its terminology and definition, high roads into nature, had trained a race of athletic philosophers. Harvey had shown the circulation of the blood; Gilbert had shown that the earth was a magnet; Descartes, taught by Gilbert's magnet, with its vortex, spiral, and polarity, had filled Europe with the leading thought of vortical motion, as the secret of nature. Newton, in the year in which Swedenborg was born, published the "Principia," and established the universal ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that the ambassador not only consented to his immediate departure, but also caused him to be accompanied by his own secretary, M. Descartes, by whom he was to be introduced to the sovereign. The precaution proved salutary, as no later than the following morning the officers of the law were sent to the house of Leyre, and being unable to find him, forthwith mounted in their turn ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... 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 ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... character, '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; nor to notice that the distinction of classes had ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... conception here formed of it, has no concern with the nature of the act of judging or believing; the consideration of that act, as a phenomenon of the mind, belongs to another science. Philosophers, however, from Descartes downward, and especially from the era of Leibnitz and Locke, have by no means observed this distinction; and would have treated with great disrespect any attempt to analyze the import of Propositions, unless founded ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... to be but the elements of a vast mechanism, regulated by the same laws as those which express the falling of a stone to the ground. There is a passage in the preface to the first edition of the Principia, which shows that Newton was penetrated, as completely as Descartes, with the belief that all the phenomena of nature are expressible in terms ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... the Victory over Galileo. Rejoicings of churchmen over the victory The silencing of Descartes Persecution of Campanella and of Kepler Persistence and victory of science Dilemma of the theologians Vain attempts ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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, ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... walked; Mlle d'Orbe could with difficulty keep up with him. Both ascended to the fifth storey in the house in the Rue Descartes, where this poor family lived. When they reached the door, Henry tapped softly at ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... Rambouillet mansion, the selectest literary genius and fame of France were proud and glad to assemble for the discussion and criticism of literature. Here came Balzac and Voiture; here Corneille read aloud his masterpieces before they were represented on the stage; here Descartes philosophized; here the large and splendid genius of Bossuet first unfolded itself to the world; here Madame de Sevigne brought her bright, incisive wit, trebly commended by stainless reputation, unwithering beauty, and charming address, in the woman who wielded it. The noblest ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... the opening of the "modern" era. Speaking generally, it may be said that as knowledge of natural law extended, the idea of mental activities in external nature was ousted. Mechanical views of the universe gradually prevailed, and reached a passing climax in Descartes' contention that even ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... even by deputy, I know you will have no hesitation in saying so, and in giving me as frank a refusal as my request. [As against his dislike of consenting to a rite, to him meaningless, he was moved by a feeling which in part corresponded to Descartes' morale par provision,—in part was an acknowledgment of the possibilities of individual development, making it only fair to a child to give it a connection with the official spiritual organisation of its country, which it could either ignore or continue ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... the standpoint from which we must view the heroes of 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
... about philosophy when you shut yourself up in your own individual thoughts. A mistake! The most powerful genius of modern times failed in this enterprise. Descartes conceived the project of forgetting all that he had known, and of producing a system of doctrine which should come forth from his brain as Minerva sprang all armed from the brain of Jupiter. Now-a-days a mere schoolboy, if he has been well taught, ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... of Genius," quite a list—Corneille, Descartes, Virgil, Addison, La Fontaine, Dryden, Manzoni, and Newton—of those who could not express themselves in public. Whatever part self-consciousness played in the individual case, we must class the peculiarity among the defects, not signs, of genius. "A tender heel ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... 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 ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... 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 neither ancestors nor descendants; ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... man and many of the lower vertebrates, hanging by two peduncles, or strands of nerve fibre, from the thalami, or beds of the optic nerve, is a small rounded or heart-shaped body of about the size of a pea, known as the pineal gland. It is so destitute of any evident function that Descartes, in lack of any more probable explanation of its presence, ascribed to it the noble duty of serving as the seat of the soul. Late research has been more successful in tracking this organ to its lair. It is larger in the embryo than in the adult man, ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... famous theologian in Seville registered in a public document with those who were discussing with him, 'that we would far rather err with Saint Clement, Saint Basil and Saint Augustin, than agree with Descartes and Newton.' ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 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 they might have been ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... the t-th moment that 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, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... 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
... Descartes boldly faced this dilemma, and maintained that all animals were mere machines and entirely devoid of consciousness. But he did not deny, nor can anyone deny, that in this case they are reasoning machines, capable of performing ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... ideas with 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 ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... The commotions of the times, however, disturbed him; and his Royalist principles, expounded in his treatise, De Corpore Politico, led to his again, in 1641, leaving England and going to Paris, where he remained until 1652. While there, he entered into controversy on mathematical subjects with Descartes, pub. some of his principal works, including Leviathan, and received, in 1647, the appointment of mathematical tutor to the Prince of Wales, afterwards Charles II., who was then in that city. The ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... 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 I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... law, the essential being, the hidden force, that causes those phenomena—thus reducing the data supplied by observation to their simple principles. Intellectual consciousness was first extricated by Descartes from that sophistry of thought which unsettles everything. As it was the purely German nations among whom the principle of spirit first manifested itself, so it was by the Romanic nations that the abstract idea ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... wrung them with tears. "I told them so, I told them so. What if they did see these French gentry visiting thee? Political emissaries forsooth! As well fear for the virtue of the ladies of quality who toil up his stairs, quoth I. They do but seek further explications of their Descartes. Ah, France may have begotten a philosopher, but it requires Holland to shelter him, a Dutchman to understand him. That musked gallant a spy! Why, that was D'Henault, the poet. How do I know? Well, when a man inquires for D'Henault's poems and is half-pleased because I have the book, and half-annoyed ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... then is, 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 around us. But what is it in us that ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... 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 inference of being from thought ...
— Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Debate Index - Second Edition • Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
... repute, and congeniality to desire are readily made measuring rods of truth. 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
... and I were chatting in one corner on interests specially feminine, the Dominie had got Mr. Remington into a metaphysical discussion of some length. From time to time we heard, "Pascal's idea seems to be," and then, "The notion of Descartes and all that school of thinkers"; and feeling that they were plunging quite beyond our depth, we continued babbling of dry goods, and what was becoming, till Mr. Remington leaned back laughing to us, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... exposition. His object in the Traite des verites premieres (1717), his 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 most men, in order to enable them, when they have arrived at the age ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... experienced, or a long and wonderful history of human experience in divine matters, or a personal attraction affecting the soul impels one. This is, I say, its essence. So a pilgrimage may be made to the tomb of Descartes, in Paris, or it may be a little walk uphill to a neighbouring and beloved grave, or a modern travel, even in luxury, on the impulse to see something that greatly ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... A few further remarks may justify this somewhat severe estimate. After stating that in the solution of life and soul problems, science stops short at germs and nucleated cells, he proceeds with the usual tirade against metaphysics: "Take Descartes' fundamental axiom: Cogito ergo sum.... Is it really an axiom?... If the fact that I am conscious of thinking proves the fact that I exist, is the converse true that whatever does not think does not exist?... Does a child only begin to exist when it begins to think? ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... very 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
... sentence where I say things mortal have immortal rights to permanence, the core of the whole business is touched upon. And I suppose that the great men who could really think and did not merely fire off fireworks to dazzle their contemporaries—I suppose that Descartes, for instance, if he were here sitting at my table—could help me to solve that contradiction; but I sit and think and cannot ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... say they are insane, but mad. "Man is an intelligent spirit," or mind, "served by an organism." We know that mind exists by our consciousness of that which passes within us. The propriety of the sayings of Descartes, "I think, therefore I am," rests upon the consciousness that we are thinking beings. This intelligence is not obtained by the exercise of any of the senses. It does not depend upon external surroundings. Its existence is a fact of consciousness, of certain ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... an inconceivable velocity as that claimed for light, by any means or appliances which may be devised by human ingenuity, must be regarded as futile. DESCARTES says: "Light reaches us instantaneously from the sun, and would do so, even if the intervening distance were greater than that between the ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... the process was the rationalistic. With Copernicus and Galileo defeated by the Vatican, with Descartes having to defend his orthodoxy, it seemed to the English and French philosophers of the eighteenth century that the only way man could save his spiritual nature from falling a prey to animalism or materialism was by consigning to destruction the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... Raymond Brucker, who 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
... able to think, then you must acknowledge that man is able to think without a soul, or you must acknowledge that the soul is not the essential principle of thought and action. Until after the time of Descartes, who later argued philosophically that animals were only machines, it was scarcely possible to argue rationally about the ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... address there is no time to speak of other sciences, and to point out the particular evidence furnished by each to establish the dominion of law, nor to more than mention the name of Descartes, the first who undertook to give an explanation of the celestial motions, or who formed the vast and philosophic conception of reducing all the phenomena of the universe to the same law; of Montaigne, one ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... 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 attain to absolute dominion over them. However, in my opinion, he accomplishes ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... 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 ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... between Tours and Poitiers, on the 31st of 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. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... that is perhaps another thing altogether. This is the way Descartes expounds the theory—Descartes, that mortal who, if he had lived in pagan times, would have been made a god, and who holds a place between man and the higher spirits, just as some I could name—beasts of burden with long ears—hold a place between man and the oysters. Thus, I say, reasons ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... 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 Faraday was the ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... elementary virtues of plain-speaking and direct dealing, love of country and the sacredness of duty, I have had no use for the metaphysician. I haven't the remotest notion what his jargon means. From Aristotle to William James, I have dipped into quite a lot of them—Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Schopenhauer (the thrice besotted Teutonic ass who said that women weren't beautiful), for I hate to be thought an ignorant duffer—and I have never come across in them anything worth ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... time, was effected on the one side by psychological analysis, and on the other by the direct and experimental observation of nature. Setting aside the gradual preparation which led up to this point, we can consider Descartes and Galileo as the representatives of these two great factors; since the one by the analysis of thought, the other by natural experiments, overthrew the mythical ideas, although without being aware that the achievement ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... 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, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... 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; and, as it regards more particularly ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... Proudhon, in spite of yourself, inevitably, by the fact of your destiny, a writer, an author; you will be a philosopher; you will be one of the lights of the century, and your name will occupy a place in the annals of the nineteenth century, like those of Gassendi, Descartes, Malebranche, and Bacon in the seventeenth, and those of Diderot, Montesquieu, Helvetius. Locke, Hume, and Holbach in the eighteenth. Such will be your lot! Do now what you will, set type in a printing-office, bring up children, bury yourself in deep seclusion, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... 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 ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke |
