paign during the
opening stages of the Thirty Years' War, in which at this time the young
Frenchman was a soldier on the Roman Catholic side, that Descartes,
sitting alone all day in a heated room of some German house, resolved to
have done with outworn systems of thought and with tradition, and
determined to make the search for truth the object of his life.[26] The
new scientific method, which was the fruit of his reflections and
experiments, and which has since been carried into every field of human
research, does not now concern us. The feature of his philosophy which
impressed these serious seekers after God was his fresh discovery of what
is involved in the nature of self-consciousness. Beginning with the bold
resolution to accept nothing untested, to doubt everything in the
universe that can be doubted, and to receive as truth only that which
successfully resists every attempt to doubt it, he found one absolutely
solid point with which to start, in the self-existence of
self-consciousness--"At least I who am doubting am thinking, and to think
is to exist." {125} Pushing his search deeper down to see what is further
involved in the constitution of this self-consciousness, he discovered a
consciousness of God--the idea of an infinitely perfect Being--within
himself, and this consciousness of God seemed to him to be the underlying
condition of every kind of knowledge whatever. It turns out to be
impossible, he believes, to think of the "finite" without contrasting it,
in implication at least, with the "infinite" which is therefore in
consciousness, just as it is impossible to talk of "spaces" without
presupposing the one space of which given "spaces" are parts. That we
are oppressed with our own littleness, that we "look before and after and
sigh for what is not," that we are conscious of finiteness, means that we
partake in some way of an infinite which reveals itself in us by an
inherent necessity of self-consciousness. There are, then, some ideas
within us--at least there is this one idea of an infinitely perfect
reality--_implanted_ in the very structure of our thinking self, which
could have come from no other source but from God, who is that infinitely
perfect Reality. Other things may still be doubtful, and a tinge of
uncertainty may rest upon everything external to the mind that perceives
them, but _the soul and God are sure_, and, of these two certainties, God
is as sure as the soul itself, because an i