They do everything in their power to make fortune favor them in this life, but nevertheless they think so little of it, in relation to eternity, that they view the events of the world as we do those of a play.
rené Descartesquotes
1596 - 1650
In a time when original thinking could get one burned at the stake, French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650) persisted in his “hope for a revolution in science.” Considered the father of modern philosophy, Descartes also influenced the scientific revolution as he promoted research firmly rooted in observation and experiment. He is the inventor of analytic geometry, as well as methodological skepticism, and known for the quote, “I think, therefore I am.”
Raised by his maternal grandmother until age 8, Descartes then attended a Jesuit boarding school. In college he studied theology, medicine, mathematics and philosophy but earned a law degree. He joined the army and traveled the globe where he, as he later explained, studied the “book of the world” to find truth.
His treatise, Discourse on Method, was published in French instead of Latin to broaden its accessibility. While known for its ground-breaking philosophical views, it also reveals Descartes true goal: To help both men and women learn to think for themselves.
Descartes moved to the more tolerant Netherlands to find solitude as well as safety for his sometimes heretical thinking. In Meditations on First Philosophy, in Which Is Proved the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul, Descartes offers two proofs for the existence of God. Descartes was unattached to the emotions of religion, but held that a belief in God was necessary to live a moral life. He believed if man wanted change rather than pray to God, he must to learn to change himself.
For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellence, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.
My third maxim was to endeavor always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world, and in general, accustom myself to the persuasion that, except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power; so that when we have done our best in things external to us, all wherein we fail of success is to be held, as regards us, absolutely impossible: and this single principle seemed to me sufficient to prevent me from desiring for the future anything which I could not obtain, and thus render me contented.
Although we very clearly see the sun, we ought not therefore to determine that it is only of the size which our sense of sight presents; and we may very distinctly imagine the head of a lion joined to the body of a goat, without being therefore shut up to the conclusion that a chimaera exists; for it is not a dictate of reason that what we thus see or imagine is in reality existent; but it plainly tells us that all our ideas or notions contain in them some truth.
When I turn my mind’s eye upon myself, I understand that I am a thing which is incomplete and dependent on another and which aspires without limit to ever greater and better things.
The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.
It is thus quite certain that the constitution of the true religion, the ordinances of which are derived from God, must be incomparably superior to that of every other.
And, in fine, of false sciences I thought I knew the worth sufficiently to escape being deceived by the professions of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a magician, or by the artifices and boasting of any of those who profess to know things of which they are ignorant.
Just as faith teaches us that the sovereign felicity of the other life consists in the contemplation of the divine majesty alone, so even now we can learn from experience that a similar meditation, although incomparably less perfect, allows us to enjoy the greatest happiness we are capable of feeling in this life.
By ‘God’, I understand, a substance which is infinite, independent, supremely intelligent, supremely powerful, and which created both myself and everything else […] that exists. All these attributes are such that, the more carefully I concentrate on them, the less possible it seems that they could have originated from me alone. So, from what has been said it must be concluded that God necessarily exists.
