allegeth."(1)

These were his opinions, formed while a young man in college, repeated
at intervals through his maturer years, and reiterated and emphasized in
his old age. Masses of facts were to be obtained by observing nature at
first hand, and from such accumulations of facts deductions were to be
made. In short, reasoning was to be from the specific to the general,
and not vice versa.

It was by his teachings alone that Bacon thus contributed to the
foundation of modern science; and, while he was constantly thinking
and writing on scientific subjects, he contributed little in the way of
actual discoveries. "I only sound the clarion," he said, "but I enter
not the battle."

The case of Descartes, however, is different. He both sounded the
clarion and entered into the fight. He himself freely acknowledges
his debt to Bacon for his teachings of inductive methods of study, but
modern criticism places his work on the same plane as that of the great
Englishman. "If you lay hold of any characteristic product of modern
ways of thinking," says Huxley, "either in the region of philosophy
or in that of science, you find the spirit of that thought, if not its
form, has been present in the mind of the great Frenchman."(2)

Descartes, the son of a noble family of France, was educated by Jesuit
teachers. Like Bacon, he very early conceived the idea that the methods
of teaching and studying science were wrong, but be pondered the
matter well into middle life before putting into writing his ideas of
philosophy and science. Then, in his Discourse Touching the Method of
Using One's Reason Rightly and of Seeking Scientific Truth, he pointed
out the way of seeking after truth. His central idea in this was to
emphasize the importance of DOUBT, and avoidance of accepting as truth
anything that does not admit of absolute and unqualified proof. In
reaching these conclusions he had before him the striking examples of
scientific deductions by Galileo, and more recently the discovery of the
circulation of the blood by Harvey. This last came as a revelation to
scientists, reducing this seemingly occult process, as it did, to the
field of mechanical phenomena. The same mechanical laws that governed
the heavenly bodies, as shown by Galileo, governed the action of the
human heart, and, for aught any one knew, every part of the body, and
even the mind itself.

Having once conceived this idea, Descartes began a series of dissections
and experi