Rene Descartes Essay, Research Paper

Rene Descartes

We may consider Descartes as the first of the modern school of mathematics. Ren Descartes was born near Tours on March 31, 1596, and died at Stockholm on February 11, 1650. His father, who was of good family, was accustomed to spend half the year at Rennes when the local parliament, in which he held a commission as councilor, was in session, and the rest of the time on his family estate of Les Cartes at La Haye. Ren , the second of a family of two sons and one daughter, was sent at the age of eight years to the Jesuit School at La Fl che, and of the admirable discipline and education there given he speaks most highly. On account of his delicate health he was permitted to lie in bed till late in the mornings. This was a custom, which he always followed. When he visited Pascal in 1647 he told him that the only way to do good work in mathematics and to preserve his health was never to allow anyone to make him get up in the morning before he felt inclined to do so.

In appearance, Descartes was a small man with a large head, a prominent nose, and black hair coming down to his eyebrows. His voice was faint. In character he was cold and selfish. Considering the range of his studies he was by no means widely read, and he despised both learning and art unless something genuine could be extracted from it. He never married, and left no descendants, though he had one illegitimate daughter, who died young.

On leaving school in 1612 Descartes went to Paris to be introduced to the world of fashion. Here, through the Jesuits, he made the acquaintance of Mydorge, and renewed his schoolboy friendship with Mersenne, and together with them he devoted the two years of 1615 and 1616 to the study of mathematics. At that time a man of position usually entered either the army or the church; Descartes chose the former profession, and in 1617 joined the army of Prince Maurice of Orange, then at Breda. Walking through the streets he saw a poster in Dutch which excited his curiosity, and stopping the first passer, asked him to translate it into either French or Latin. The stranger, who happened to be Isaac Beeckman, the head of the Dutch College at Dort, offered to do so if Descartes would answer it; the poster being a challenge to the entire world to solve a certain geometrical problem. Descartes worked it out within a few hours, and a warm friendship between him and Beeckman was the result. This unexpected test of his mathematical attainments made the unpleasant life of the army distasteful to him, but under family influence and tradition he remained a soldier, and was persuaded at the commencement of the Thirty Years’ War to volunteer under Count de Bucquoy in the army of Bavaria. He continued all this time to occupy his leisure with mathematical studies, and was accustomed to date the first ideas of his new philosophy and of his analytical geometry from three dreams that he experienced on the night of November 10, 1619, at Neuberg, when campaigning on the Danube. He regarded this as the critical day of his life, and one, which determined his whole future.

He resigned his commission in the spring of 1621, and spent the next five years in travel, during most of which time he continued to study mathematics. In 1626 he settled at Paris, “a little well-built figure, only wearing sword and feather in token of his quality as a gentleman.” During the first two years there he interested himself in general society, and spent his leisure in the construction of optical instruments; but these pursuits were merely the relaxation of one who failed to find in philosophy that theory of the universe which he was convinced finally awaited him.

In 1628 Cardinal de Berulle, the founder of the Oratorians, met Descartes, and was so impressed by his conversation that he urged on him the duty of devoting his life to examining of truth. Descartes agreed, and to secure himself from interruption, he moved to Holland. There for twenty years he lived, giving up all his time to philosophy and mathematics. Science , he says, may be compared to a tree; metaphysics is the root, physics is the trunk, and the three chief branches are mechanics, medicine, and morals, these forming the three applications of our knowledge, namely, to the external world, to the human body, and to the conduct of life.

He spend the first four years, 1629 to 1633, of his stay in Holland in writing Le Monde, which embodies an attempt to give a physical theory of the universe. However, finding that its publication was likely to bring on him the hostility of the church, and having no desire to pose as a victim, he abandoned it. He then devoted himself to composing a thesis on universal science. This was published at Leyden in 1637 under the title Discours de la m thode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la v rit dans les sciences, and was accompanied with three appendices (which possibly were not issued till 1638) entitled La Dioptrique, Les M t ores, and La G om trie. It is from the last of these that the invention of analytical geometry dates. In 1641 he published a work called Meditationes, in which he explained at some length his views on philosophy as sketched out in the Discours. In 1644 he issued the Principia Philosophiae, the greater part of which was devoted to physical science, especially the laws of motion and the theory of vortices. In 1647 he received a pension from the French court in honor of his discoveries. He went to Sweden on the invitation of the Queen in 1649, and died a few months later of inflammation of the lungs.

As to his philosophical theories, it will be sufficient to say he studied theories that will always be unanswered by mankind. I have read somewhere that philosophy has always been chiefly engaged with the inter-relations of God, Nature, and Man. The earliest philosophers were Greeks who occupied themselves mainly with the relations between God and Nature, and dealt with Man separately. The Christian Church was so absorbed in the relation of God to Man as entirely to neglect Nature. Finally, modern philosophers concern themselves chiefly with the relations between Man and Nature.

Descartes physical theory of the universe, embodying most of the results contained in his earlier and unpublished Le Monde, is given in his Principia, 1644, and rests on a metaphysical basis. He ends with a discussion on motion; and then lays down ten laws of nature, of which the first two are almost identical with the first two laws of motion as given by Newton; the remaining eight laws are inaccurate. He next proceeds to discuss the nature of matter, which he refers to as uniform in kind though there are three forms of it. He assumes that the matter of the universe must be in motion, and that the motion must result in a number of vortices. He states that the sun is the center of an immense whirlpool of this matter, in which the planets float and are swept around like straws in a whirlpool of water. Each planet is supposed to be the center of another whirlpool by which its satellites are carried: these other whirlpools are supposed to produce diversity of density in the surrounding medium which makes up the primary whirlpool, and causes the planets to move in ovals and not in circles. On his hypothesis the sun would be in the center of these ellipses, and not at a focus, and that the weight of a body at every place on the surface of the earth, except the equator, would act in a direction which was not vertical. The theory of vortices marks a fresh era in astronomy, for it was an attempt to explain the phenomena of the whole universe by the same mechanical laws which experiment shows to be true on the earth.