Descartes was born in Touraine in 1596, and for the larger part of his life he was at least nominally a resident in the Paris of Louis XIV, Montaigne, and the earlier Jesuits. He was educated at a school of the Jesuits in La Flêche, and in the course of his mature life he published works of importance not merely in philosophy, but also in science and mathematics. His _Meditations_ and _Search after Truth_ are easily first among his contributions to philosophy. He died in 1650.
Yet not exactly with the Descartes of positive history, but with Descartes as a doubter, as perhaps the most notable progenitor of the modern confession [p.173] and the modern use of doubt, are we now directly concerned; for without the license of this broader view we might lose a large part of the advantage of the centuries that lie between Descartes' time and our own. He had many disciples, and these disciples uncovered much in the Cartesian philosophy that Descartes himself failed to see, or saw only imperfectly. He was not without faults, too, some moral and some intellectual, if the two are separate, and these faults we shall not consider, though the conscientious historian should never play to the sentimentalist by disregarding them. But with our present task we can afford to forget the faults; just as we cannot afford to lose the interpretations and corrections of the disciples. With interests as vital and personal as ours, we seek something more than matter of fact. Our interest is very near to that of the historical novel, but needless to say, this book is an essay in philosophy, not a novel. Past men and past times can be really useful to us, only if, belonging as we do not to the seventeenth but to the twentieth century, we really use them. What we ourselves are able to find in any period or in any human career is always truer or realer, possibly in a sense it is also better history, than what lay on the surface at the time or than what was seen, however profoundly, even by contemporaries. So much better did Descartes and all really great men build than they knew or even willed.
Descartes came into European life at a crucial moment. The period of the Renaissance, with its rediscovery of the old world and its stirring vision of the new, had culminated in the Reformation, not [p.174] merely in the religious reformation that set Protestant against Catholic, but in the reformation that appeared in every department of man's life--in art, literature, and science, in morals and in politics, as well as in religion. Man asserted his independence of established authority in any form. Man, not king, not pope, not even God, became the real centre of the universe. Justification by his own faith was simply overflowing with a meaning that knew no bounds in his experience.