XIV. 



ON DESCARTES &quot;DISCOURSE TOUCHING THE 

 METHOD OF USING ONE S REASON RIGHTLY 

 AND OF SEEKING SCIENTIFIC TRUTH.&quot; 



IT has been well said that &quot; all the thoughts of men, from the 

 beginning of the world until now, are linked together into one 

 great chain ; &quot; but the conception of the intellectual filiation of 

 mankind which is expressed in these words may, perhaps, be 

 more fitly shadowed forth by a different metaphor. The thoughts 

 of men seem rather to be comparable to the leaves, flowers, and 

 fruit upon the innumerable branches of a few great stems, fed 

 by commingled and hidden roots. These stems bear the names 

 of the half-a-dozen men, endowed with intellects of heroic force 

 and clearness, to whom we are led, at whatever point of the 

 world of thought the attempt to trace its history commences, 

 just as certainly as the following up the small twigs of a tree to 

 the branchlets which bear them, and tracing the branchlets 

 to their supporting branches, brings us, sooner or later, to the 

 bole. 



It seems to me that the thinker who, more than any other, 

 stands in the relation of such a stem towards the philosophy and 

 the science of the modern world is Rene Descartes. I mean, 

 that if you lay hold of any characteristic product of modern ways 

 of thinking, either in the region of philosophy, or in that of 



