218 THE WORLD MACHINE 



enough alone. He retired to Holland. He must have thought 

 well of the advice of Epicurus " Veil thy days " ; only one 

 or two of his friends knew of his address. 



In Holland he changed his residence twenty-four times in 

 not so many years. He never married. He had a daughter, 

 like Galileo, at whose death he was deeply moved. Beyond 

 that, this world seemed to exist for him only as a subject for 

 meditation and analysis. In pages that are models of clear 

 and simple exposition like Galileo, again, he was a writer of 

 distinction, one of the founders of the exquisite prose literature 

 of France he has detailed at length his method and his ways. 

 It is of interest to know that he never worked but a few hours 

 a day, and that in bed ; he did not get up until eleven. His 

 life was comparatively brief ; he died at fifty-four, having been 

 lured to the court of Queen Christina of Sweden and there con- 

 tracting a fever. His real career hardly began before he was 

 thirty-three, yet few men ever covered a more extraordinary 

 range in their studies. 



You catch a glimpse of his method in his famous aphorism, 

 cogito ergo sum. This is the keynote of his metaphysics ; it is 

 typical of his whole philosophy. He lays hold of the simplest, 

 surest, most obvious fact that he may discover. Certain of his 

 foundations, on this he builds. And just as the geometer, start- 

 ing with a few simple lines, puts them together into triangles, 

 squares, and other figures, and beginning with the simplest 

 propositions, mounts step by step to others the most complex 

 and abstruse, so Descartes, beginning with propositions over 

 which there could seem no possible doubt, rose to conceptions 

 that were certainly grandiose if they were not sublime. Un- 

 fortunately, they did not turn out to be true. Never did any 

 system-monger lose himself more hopelessly in the baseless 

 abstractions of his own thoughts. Descartes sought nothing 

 less than a complete system of the universe. His mistake lay 

 in believing that he might construct it from a series of axioms 

 like a geometer. 



Absorbed in the elaboration of his wondrous fancies, for him 

 his contemporaries did not exist. His deepest interest in Galileo 

 appears to have been the stories of Galileo's persecution and 

 torture. He was not in the least of the martyr mould ; his 

 fright was so great that he straight away left off publishing 

 his chief work, upon which he had been engaged for years, and 



