whole tradition of humanity, he resolved
"never to accept anything as true until he recognized it to be clearly
so, and not to comprise amongst his opinions anything but what presented
itself so clearly and distinctly to his mind that he could have no
occasion to hold it in doubt." In this absolute isolation of his mind,
without past and without future, Descartes, first of all assured of his
own personal existence by that famous axiom, "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think,
therefore I am), drew from it, as a necessary consequence, the fact of
the separate existence of soul and of body; passing oft by a sort of
internal revelation which he called innate ideas, he came to the pinnacle
of his edifice, concluding for the existence of a God from the notion of
the infinite impressed on the human soul. A laborious reconstruction of
a primitive and simple truth which the philosopher could not, for a
single moment, have banished from his mind all the while that he was
laboring painfully to demonstrate it.

By a tacit avowal of the weakness of the human mind, the speculations of
Descartes stopped short at death. He had hopes, however, of retarding
the moment of it. "I felt myself alive," he said, at forty years of age,
"and, examining myself with as much care as if I were a rich old man, I
fancied I was even farther from death than I had been in my youth." He
had yielded to the entreaties of Queen Christina of Sweden, who had
promised him an observatory, like that of Tycho Brahe. He was delicate,
and accustomed to follow a regimen adapted to his studies. "O flesh!"
he wrote to Gassendi, whose philosophy contradicted his own: "O idea!"
answered Gassendi. The climate of Stockholm was severe; Descartes caught
inflammation of the lungs; he insisted upon doctoring himself, and died
on the 11th of February, 1650. "He didn't want to resist death," said
his friends, not admitting that their master's will could be vanquished
by death itself. His influence remained for a long while supreme over
his age. Bossuet and Fenelon were Cartesians. "I think, therefore I
am," wrote Madame de Sevigne to her daughter. "I think of you tenderly,
therefore I love you; I think only of you in that manner, therefore I
love you only." Pascal alone, though adopting to a certain extent
Descartes' form of reasoning, foresaw the excess to which other minds
less upright and less firm would push the system of the great
philosopher. "I cannot forgive Descarte