RENÉ DESCARTES, one of the greatest philosophers and mathematicians of Europe, was born at La Haye, France, March 31st, 1596. After graduating at the Jesuit College of La Flèche, he spent five years in Paris and eleven years in traveling, or, in the life of a soldier, witnessing the horrors of the wars with which Europe was then being wasted as a result of the growth of power of the people and the attempt to maintain the feudal system against it. At thirty-three, Descartes, convinced of the pressing need of intellect in the world to hold such brutality in check, retired to Holland determined to think out a way to higher civilization. “Je pense—donc je suis”—“I think—hence I exist,” is the basis of his system, and it means much more than a mere statement of fact, for the system of Descartes, logically interpreted, makes the reality of existence depend on thought, and cease when thought ceases. Very early in life Descartes had formed a habit of profound meditation, and he relied on it for results rather than on scholarship. In the ordinary sense he was not a scholar, for he did not seek knowledge through assimilating the thoughts of others, but through stimulating his own. The deduction from his reasoning is that if real thought is actually persisted in, it must lead to a knowledge of truth, no matter what the starting point. “I think—therefore I exist”—by beginning to become conscious, step by step, of everything in the universe. That is, the individual mind in thinking takes hold on the universal mind progressively, as it takes hold of the phenomena of nature in the visible universe through which the universal mind manifests itself. Hence the individual mind, existing because it thinks, exists in the universal order, and the individual thought demonstrates the universal. Descartes reasoned that under all complexities which result from the attempt to group and define the infinite order of the universe, there are primitive simplicities recognized by the mind as self-evident, absolute truths, the keys of all the rest. His effort was to teach a method of reaching these with certainty, and the object of the “Meditations” and “The Discourse on Method” was “to find a simple and indecomposable point or absolute element which gives to the world and thought their order and systematization.” In other words, he sought a scientific method of reaching an intellectual knowledge of God, whom he recognized as the origin not merely of knowledge, but of thought itself. What he attempted to prevent was the perversion of thought by the reaction of the mind upon itself, its refusal to take actual hold on the phenomena of nature, and its relapse through such refusal into inertia and practical nonexistence—i.e., “thoughtlessness.”

  Descartes has been called “the founder of modern philosophy,” but in the nineteenth century it departed far from his postulate that truth becomes knowable as God, its author, is knowable through harmonizing the individual intellect with the universal thought of creation. Descartes died at Stockholm, February 11th, 1650. The list of his metaphysical, mathematical, and scientific works is a long one, but his “Meditations” are doubtlessly the most characteristic illustration of his attempt to think his way to the central truth of things. It should be remembered in reading them, however, that Descartes was no believer in the power of mere abstraction. He believed in and assiduously practiced concrete experiment. He experimented to test his preconceived ideas of truth—as it is the privilege of every great intellect to do. It is humiliating to remember, however, that the most far-reaching discoveries are a result of the mere object teaching of experiment, and that the greatest minds have done most, not through the vindication of preconceived ideas, but through what they have learned in spite of them.