there is no more
counterfeiting; we must speak plain, and must discover what there is
of pure and clean in the bottom.

_Nam verae voces tum demum pectore ab imo
Ejiciuntur, et eripitur persona manet res._

--_Lucret._, l. 3.

"Then that at last truth issues from the heart.
The vizor's gone, we act our own true part."

Wherefore at this last all the other actions of our life ought to be
try'd and sifted. 'Tis the master-day, 'tis the day that is judge of
all the rest, 'tis the day (says one of the ancients) that ought to
judge of all my foregoing years. To death do I refer the essay of the
fruit of all my studies. We shall then see whether my discourses came
only from my mouth or from my heart. I have seen many by their death
give a good or an ill repute to their whole life. Scipio, the
father-in-law of Pompey the Great, in dying well, wip'd away the ill
opinion that till then every one had conceived of him. Epaminondas
being ask'd which of the three he had in the greatest esteem,
Chabrias, Iphicrates, or himself; "You must first see us die (said he)
before that question can be resolv'd": and, in truth, he would
infinitely wrong that great man, who would weigh him without the honor
and grandeur of his end.

God Almightly had order'd all things as it has best pleased Him; but I
have in my time seen three of the most execrable persons that ever I
knew in all manners of abominable living, and the most infamous to
boot, who all dy'd a very regular death, and in all circumstances
compos'd even to perfection. There are brave, and fortunate deaths. I
have seen death cut the thread of the progress of a prodigious
advancement, and in the height and flower of its increase of a certain
person, with so glorious an end, that in my opinion his ambitious and
generous designs had nothing in them so high and great as their
interruption; and he arrived without completing his course, at the
place to which his ambition pretended with greater glory than he could
himself either hope or desire, and anticipated by his fall the name
and power to which he aspir'd, by perfecting his career. In the
judgment I make of another man's life, I always observe how he carried
himself at his death; and the principal concern I have for my own is
that I may die handsomely; that is, patiently and without noise.

RENE DESCARTES

Born in Touraine in 1596, died in Stockholm in 1650; founder
of modern general philosophy;