His method alone engaged us, because by it alone he claims a place in this history. We have not dwelt upon his errors; neither have we dwelt upon the wondrous and manifold excellences of that mind which Mr. Macaulay has so felicitously compared to the tent which the fairy Paribanou gave to Prince Ahmed, Fold it, and it seemed a toy for the hand of a lady: spread it, and the armies of powerful sultans might repose beneath its shade.

CHAPTER I.

LIFE OF DESCARTES.

JUST at the close of the sixteenth century, 1596, there was born in Touraine, of Breton parents, a feeble sickly child, named Réné Descartes Duperron. A few days after his birth, a disease of the lungs carried off his mother. The sickly child grew to a sickly boy; and, till the age of twenty, his life was always despaired of.

That boy was one the world could ill afford to lose. Few who saw him creeping on the path, which his companions galloped along like young colts, would have supposed that the boy, whose short dry cough and paleness seemed to announce an early grave, was shortly to become one of the world's illustrious leaders; and whose works would three centuries after their appearance continue to be studied, quoted, and criticised. His masters loved him. He was a pupil of promise; and in his eighth year had gained the title of the young philosopher, from his avidity to learn, and his constant questioning.

This

His education was confided to the Jesuits. astonishing body has many evils laid to its door, but no one can refuse to it the praise of having been ever ready to see and make use of the value of education. In the college of La Flèche the young Descartes was instructed in mathematics,

physics, logic, rhetoric, and the ancient languages. He was an apt pupil; learnt quickly, and was never tired of learning.

Such was the food supplied by the Jesuits. Was it nutritious? As M. Thomas remarks, "there is an education for the ordinary man; for the man of genius there is no education but what he gives himself; the second generally consists in destroying the first." And so with Descartes; who, on leaving La Flèche, declared that he had derived no other benefit from his studies than that of a conviction of his utter ignorance, and a profound contempt for the systems of philosophy in vogue. The incompetence of philosophers to solve the problems they occupied themselves with-the anarchy which reigned in the scientific world, where no two thinkers could agree upon fundamental points the extravagances of the conclusions to which some accepted premisses led, determined him to seek no more to slake his thirst at their fountains.

"And that is why, as soon as my age permitted me to quit my preceptors," he says, I entirely gave up the study of letters; and resolving to seek no other science than that which I could find in myself, or else in the great book of the world, I employed the remainder of my youth in travel, in seeing courts and camps, in frequenting people of diverse humours and conditions, in collecting various experiences, and above all in endeavouring to draw some profitable reflection from what I saw. For it seemed to me that I should meet with more truth in the reasonings which each man makes in his own affairs, and which if wrong would be speedily punished by failure, than in those reason