says more than any of his biographers can: it shows him proud, self-contained, cool, even cold, shrewd, inscrutable, subtle. There is nothing of the ascetic and much of the man of the world in the face; the eyes are distant with much thinking, the mouth firm. There can be no doubt that this is a great man, but much doubt that it is "une âme simple, 'naïve,' au sens vrai de ce terme si français, une âme sincèrement religieuse, mystique même," as a recent French writer describes Descartes.1 One sees in the portrait an ego, which might have torn down the world to build it again upon itself. In all, there is a mask-like quality in the features, hiding-what? Descartes as a person is a riddle.

Born the last day of March, 1596, at La Haye, in Touraine, Descartes was a gentleman of good provincial French stock. As a child his health was delicate; he writes that he had inherited from his mother, who died a year after his birth, "a dry cough and a pallid complexion" which remained with him until he was twenty. This may have been in part the cause of his meditative habits in youth, which led his father to speak of him, even before he was at school, as "my philosopher." The years he spent at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, from the age of eight to sixteen, sufficed for a grand tour of the world of learning, a journey which ended in disillusionment. But La Flèche had fixed upon him his habits of meditation. The Jesuit fathers had perceived his genius, and, partly on this account partly because he was a young man of station, they had granted him special privileges. He was allowed to rise as late as he chose and to meditate in bed in the mornings, a custom which he pursued throughout life. "It was thus," says one of his biographers, "that he discovered his so-called algebra, the key to all the liberal sciences and 1 J. Chevalier, "Descartes," Paris, 1921.

rts, and the best method of distinguishing the true from the false." Before he had turned seventeen, he put aside his books, having squeezed them dry, and, gentleman that he was, after a few lessons in fencing and horsemanship, went up to the great world of Paris. At that time Paris had its charms for the young René. But Baillet remarks that the boy of seventeen, who had no other guardian than a valet de chambre, and no overseers but lackeys, showed sufficient strength of character "to keep himself free of debauched ways of living and not to fall into the disorders of intemperance; but that he was not proof against the companions who involved him in excursions, in gaming, and other amusements which passed for indifferent in the world. One thing that caused him to be particularly fond of gaming was his good luck, especially in those games which depended on calculation rather than chance."

Descartes' thoughtful temper soon reasserted itself under the influence of Father Mersenne, and he retired to an obscure lodging in the Faubourg Saint-Germain to meditate. It soon became apparent, Baillet continues, "that he had changed in his taste for pleasures. Games and excursions no longer had the same attraction for him as before; and the delights of 'les voluptés' worked only very feebly within him against the charms of Philosophy and Mathematics, in which his worldly companions could have no share."

But the lesson in the great book of the world was not yet complete. The restless mind of the philosopher displayed a taste for adventure mixed with his mathematics. "Resolving to seek no other science than that which could be found in myself," says the Discourse, "I employed the rest of my youth in travel, in seeing courts and armies, in intercourse with men of diverse temperaments and conditions, in proving myself in the

various predicaments in which I was placed by fortune." The period between 1618 and 1628, from his twentysecond to his thirty-second year, was spent in wandering; first as a volunteer in the army of Prince Maurice of Orange in the Netherlands, then in the Bavarian army, at Neuberg on the Danube and in southern Bohemia, again, in the military service in Hungary. It was a life that gave him much time for thought during the long months of idleness in winter quarters. But after a few

years, in 1621, "he carried into execution a resolve which he had taken a long time before, no longer to carry a musket." He did, however, continue his travels in Switzerland and Italy, after a brief sojourn in his father's house at Rennes, and in Paris. But he had no fixed plan of life until he finally went into seclusion in Holland in 1629. From then onward, at the advice of his friends, he began setting down for publication the philosophical ideas which had been in gestation during the decade of his wanderings. At thirty-two he was already recognized by the circle of Father Mersenne in Paris as a mathematician and philosopher of the first magnitude.

Descartes displays in his writings, especially in the Discourse and the Meditations, the true Gallic love of the histrionic. He has a genius for setting the stage, creating a situation, and dramatizing himself; and beyond a doubt there was a situation to be dramatized. Descartes' inner life during this period was intense and troubled. After years of despair, irresolution, doubt, after the world of knowledge had fallen about him and left him with nothing but his native wit, a sudden flood of light burst upon him, in the year 1619, and he solemnly resolved to devote the remainder of his days to the pursuit of truth, and to that alone. He recounts in a lost work, the Olympica, of which his biog

rapher gives a summary, how, "having gone to bed (on a certain memorable day) all full of his inspiration and wholly occupied with the thought of having discovered that very day the foundations of a wonderful science, he is visited by three consecutive dreams in a single night, which he believes to have come from above." In one of these dreams he hears a clap of thunder, which he interprets as "the Spirit of Truth descending to take possession of him;" and the following morning he prays God to give him light and to lead him in the search for truth, vowing at the same time to make a sacred pilgrimage to the shrine of Loretto to seek the aid of the Blessed Virgin. It is recorded that the pilgrimage was accomplished. The incident explains the fervour of Descartes' appeal to the "natural light" of reason, and his faith that the eternal truths of mathematics, physics, and metaphysics are guaranteed by the goodness of God.

The important years between 1629 and 1649, spent for the most part in Holland, brought Cartesianism to a full expression. The Discourse, the Geometry, the Dioptrics, the Meditations, the Principles of Philosophy, make their appearance during the first fifteen years; Descartes answers objections, engages in disputes, conciliates the clergy; but all the while remains in seclusion from the world, with his servants, and, for a short time, in the company of his natural daughter, Francine, who died at the age of six. Baillet records that "he wept for the child with a tenderness which gave him proof that the true philosophy never extinguishes the natural."

Shortly after he came to Holland, the philosopher prepared the manuscript of a work on physics, which was to be complete and revolutionary. But “M. Descartes," remarks Bossuet, "was always afraid of coming under the notice of the Church, and we see him taking

precautions in this matter which go to excess." He had before him the fate of the philosophers of the preceding century who had ventured to question the accepted physical doctrines. Ramus, Bruno, Campanella, Vanini, had suffered for their opinions, and Descartes did not propose to join their company. A French historian of philosophy gives the following picture of these men of the sixteenth century: "True knight-errants of philosophy, they wandered from university to university, breaking their lances against Aristotle. Followed from city to city by the terrible accusation of impiety and atheism, they found no fixed dwelling-place on the earth. To slake the burning thirst for truth that consumed them, they dipped into every spring, into antiquity, into cabalism, into magic and alchemy, into the dreams of their own imagination. Carried away by their blind rashness, they surrendered themselves, so to speak, into the hands of judges and inquisitors; they languished in horrible dungeons, they were condemned to do public penance, tortured, dragged to execution. Such is the spectacle they presented to the people! This is how Ramus, Giordano Bruno, Campanella, Vanini, lived and how they died. We can say of the whole century what Campanella, in a play of words on his name, said of himself: 'I am merely the bell that proclaims a new dawn.'

Descartes, too, raised his lance against Aristotle, but not to shatter it. He was ready to soften the blow for the sake of the Church. Toward the end of the year 1633, he wrote to Father Mersenne that he had intended sending him his new physical treatise, Le Monde, as a New Year's gift, but that he had just been at Leyden and Amsterdam to ask after Galileo's cosmological system, only to be told that it had been printed but that every copy had been burned at Rome, and that Galileo