iv PUBLISHERS' PREFACE. 



the outcome of right thinking and right seeing, the privilege of 

 every man. The appeal throughout was made to "the great book 

 of the world, " to experiment, to observation. ' ' Here is my library, " 

 said Descartes to an inquirer, as he pointed to a quartered calf he 

 was busy dissecting. 



Such an attitude would be impossible now ; the present age 

 has a real past of science behind it. But it was necessary then ; 

 the past which lay directly behind Descartes, with a few bright 

 exceptions like Bruno and Campanella, was a past of slavish sub- 

 mission to authority, both in action and in thought ; and the utter 

 demolition of this past was the self -chosen task of the great recluse- 

 philosopher, who believed he had stript himself of every clog that 

 the heritage of antiquity had placed upon man's intellect. 



And here lies both the virtue and defect of his system. Des- 

 cartes was primarily a mathematician. He found in mathematics, 

 as did Kant and Comte, the type of all faultless thought not in 

 the traditional mathematics as such, but in mathematics as regen- 

 erated and inspirited by his own epoch-making discoveries. The 

 geometrical analysis of Plato and the ancients was, at best, a hap- 

 hazard procedure, depending almost entirely on the insight and 

 skill of the manipulator, concerned for the logic rather than for 

 the power of the method, and yielding in almost all cases isolated 

 results, not general and comprehensive truths. But the method 

 of Descartes was an engine of research ; it reduced geometry largely 

 to algebra ; of the science of the eye it made a science of the mind ; 

 from a part it deduced a whole ; for the rich exuberance of nat- 

 ural forms it substituted the economy and precision of a purely 

 logical mechanism. Was he not justified, therefore, in pointing 

 with pride to the maxims and rules by which his mediocre talents, 

 as he termed them, had been enabled to advance the truth so 

 powerfully ? He was on the verge of a universal Mathematical 

 Science, why was it not possible to construct a Universal Formal 

 Science, manipulable with the same mechanical precision, and ap- 

 plicable to physics, chemistry, cosmology, biology, psychology, 

 and theology ? Why was it not possible to deduce God, man, and 

 society from a few simple fundamental truths, as the properties of 

 a curve were developable from an algebraical equation ? 



Hence resulted the Cartesian physics and metaphysics, half 



