Whence then come my errors? They come from the sole fact that since the will is much wider in its range and compass than the understanding, I do not restrain it within the same bounds, but extend it also to things which I do not understand: and as the will is of itself indifferent to these, it easily falls into error and sin, and chooses the evil for the good, or the false for the true.
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.
This result could have been achieved either by his [God] endowing my intellect with a clear and distinct perception of everything about which I would ever deliberate, or simply by impressing the following rule so firmly upon my memory that I could never forget it: I should never judge anything that I do not clearly and distinctly understand.
You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.
Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.
I am thing that thinks: that is, a things that doubts, affirms, denies, understands a few things, is ignorant of many things, is willing, is unwilling, and also which imagines and has sensory perceptions.
I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.
Bad books engender bad habits, but bad habits engender good books.
It is best not to go on for great quest for truth, it will only make you miserable.
With me, everything turns into mathematics.