civility, and the name of Descartes was no longer proscribed. But other annoyances were not wanting from unfaithful disciples and unsympathetic critics. The Instantiae of Gassendi appeared at Amsterdam in 1644 as a reply to the reply which Descartes had published of his previous objections; and the publication by Heinrich Regius of his work on physical philosophy (Fundamenta physices, 1646) gave the world to understand that he had ceased to be a thorough adherent of the philosophy which he had so enthusiastically adopted.
It was about 1648 that Descartes lost his friends Mersenne and Mydorge by death. The place of Mersenne as his Parisian representative was in the main taken by Claude Clerselier (the French translator of the Objections and Responses), whom he had become acquainted with in Paris. Through Clerselier he came to know Pierre Chanut, who in 1645 was sent as French ambassador to the court of Sweden. Queen Christina was not yet twenty, and took a lively if a somewhat whimsical interest in literary and philosophical culture. Through Chanut, with whom she was on terms of familiarity, she came to hear of Descartes, and a correspondence which the latter nominally carried on with the ambassador was in reality intended for the eyes of the queen. The correspondence took an ethical tone. It began with a long letter on love in all its aspects (February 1647),[1] a topic suggested by Chanut, who had been discussing it with the queen; and this was soon followed by another to Christina herself on the chief good. An essay on the passions of the mind (Passions de l’âme), which had been written originally for the princess Elizabeth, in development of some ethical views suggested by the De vita beata of Seneca, was enclosed at the same time for Chanut. It was a draft of the work published in 1650 under the same title. Philosophy, particularly that of Descartes, was becoming a fashionable divertissement for the queen and her courtiers, and it was felt that the presence of the sage himself was necessary to complete the good work of education. An invitation to the Swedish court was urged upon Descartes, and after much hesitation accepted; a vessel of the royal navy was ordered to wait upon him, and in September 1649 he left Egmond for the north.
The position on which he entered at Stockholm was unsuited for a man who wished to be his own master. The young queen wanted Descartes to draw up a code for a proposed academy of the sciences, and to give her an hour of philosophic instruction every morning at five. She had already Death.determined to create him a noble, and begun to look out an estate in the lately annexed possessions of Sweden on the Pomeranian coast. But these things were not to be. His friend Chanut fell dangerously ill; and Descartes, who devoted himself to attend in the sick-room, was obliged to issue from it every morning in the chill northern air of January, and spend an hour in the palace library. The ambassador recovered, but Descartes fell a victim to the same disease, inflammation of the lungs. The last time he saw the queen was on the 1st of February 1650, when he handed to her the statutes he had drawn up for the proposed academy. On the 11th of February he died. The queen wished to bury him at the feet of the Swedish kings, and to raise a costly mausoleum in his honour; but these plans were overruled, and a plain monument in the Catholic cemetery was all that marked the place of his rest. Sixteen years after his death the French treasurer d’Alibert made arrangements for the conveyance of the ashes to his native land; and in 1667 they were interred in the church of Ste Geneviève du Mont, the modern Pantheon. In 1819, after being temporarily deposited in a stone sarcophagus in the court of the Louvre during the Revolutionary epoch, they were transferred to St Germain-des-Près, where they now repose between Montfaucon and Mabillon. A monument was raised to his memory at Stockholm by Gustavus III.; and a modern statue has been erected to him at Tours, with an inscription on the pedestal: “Je pense, donc je suis.”
Descartes never married, and had little of the amorous in his temperament. He has alluded to a childish fancy for a young girl with a slight obliquity of vision; but he only mentions it à propos of the consequent weakness which led him to associate such a defect with beauty.[2] In person he was small, with large head, projecting brow, prominent nose, and eyes wide apart, with black hair coming down almost to his eyebrows. His voice was feeble. He usually dressed in black, with unobtrusive propriety.
Philosophy.—The end of all study, says Descartes, in one of his earliest writings, ought to be to guide the mind to form true and sound judgments on every thing that may be presented to it.[3] The sciences in their totality are but the intelligence of man; and all the details of knowledge have no value save as they strengthen the understanding. The mind is not for the sake of knowledge, but knowledge for the sake of the mind. This is the reassertion of a principle which the middle ages had lost sight of—that knowledge, if it is to have any value, must be intelligence, and not erudition.
But how is intelligence, as opposed to erudition, possible? The answer to that question is the method of Descartes. That idea of a method grew up with his study of geometry and arithmetic,—the only branches of knowledge which he would allow to be “made sciences.” But Mathematics.they did not satisfy his demand for intelligence. “I found in them,” he says, “different propositions on numbers of which, after a calculation, I perceived the truth; as for the figures, I had, so to speak, many truths put before my eyes, and many others concluded from them by analogy; but it did not seem to me that they told my mind with sufficient clearness why the things were as I was shown, and by what means their discovery was attained.”[4] The mathematics of which he thus speaks included the geometry of the ancients, as it had been handed down to the modern world, and arithmetic with the developments it had received in the direction of algebra. The ancient geometry, as we know it, is a wonderful monument of ingenuity—a series of tours de force, in which each problem to all appearance stands alone, and, if solved, is solved by methods and principles peculiar to itself. Here and there particular curves, for example, had been obliged to yield the secret of their tangent; but the ancient geometers apparently had no consciousness of the general bearings of the methods which they so successfully applied. Each problem was something unique; the elements of transition from one to another were wanting; and the next step which mathematics had to make was to find some method of reducing, for instance, all curves to a common notation. When that was found, the solution of one problem would immediately entail the solution of all others which belonged to the same series as itself.
The arithmetical half of mathematics, which had been gradually growing into algebra, and had decidedly established itself as such in the Ad logisticen speciosam notae priores of François Vieta (1540–1603), supplied to some extent the means of generalizing geometry. And the algebraists or arithmeticians of the 16th century, such as Luca Pacioli (Lucas de Borgo), Geronimo or Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), and Niccola Tartaglia (1506–1559), had used geometrical constructions to throw light on the solution of particular equations. But progress was made difficult, in consequence of the clumsy and irregular nomenclature employed. With Descartes the use of exponents as now employed for denoting the powers of a quantity becomes systematic; and without some such step by which the homogeneity of successive powers is at once recognized, the binomial theorem could scarcely have been detected. The restriction of the early letters of the alphabet to known, and of the late letters to unknown, quantities is also his work. In this and other details he crowns and completes, in a form henceforth to be dominant for the language of algebra, the work of numerous obscure predecessors, such as Étienne de la Roche, Michael Stifel or Stiefel (1487–1567), and others.
Having thus perfected the instrument, his next step was to apply it in such a way as to bring uniformity of method into the isolated and independent operations of geometry. “I had no intention,”[5] he says in the Method, “of attempting to master all
