Part 14

When the results of this meditative solitude were given to the world in the shape of his celebrated _Discourse on Method_, and his _Meditations_--to which he invented replies--the sensation produced was immense. It was evident to all men that an original thinker had arisen; and although this originality could not but rouse much opposition, from the very fact of being original, yet Descartes gained the day. His name became European. His controversies were European quarrels. Charles I of England invited him over, with the promise of a liberal appointment; and the invitation would probably have been accepted had not the civil war broken out. He afterward received a flattering invitation from Christina of Sweden, who had read some of his works with great satisfaction, and wished to learn from himself the principles of his philosophy.

He accepted it, and arrived in Stockholm in 1649. His reception was most gratifying, and the Queen was so pleased with him as earnestly to beg him to remain with her, and give his assistance toward the establishment of an academy of sciences. But the delicate frame of Descartes was ill fitted for the severity of the climate, and a cold, caught in one of his morning visits to Christina, produced inflammation of the lungs, which carried him off.

Christina wept for him, had him interred in the cemetery for foreigners, and placed a long eulogium upon his tomb. His remains were subsequently (1666) carried from Sweden into France, and buried with great ceremony in Ste. Geneviève du Mont.

Descartes was a great thinker; but having said this, we have almost exhausted the praise we could bestow upon him as a man. In disposition he was timid to servility. When promulgating his proofs of the existence of the Deity, he was in evident alarm lest the Church should see something objectionable in them. He had also written an astronomical treatise; but hearing of the fate of Galileo, he refrained from publishing, and always used some chicane in speaking of the world's movement. He was not a brave man, nor was he an affectionate man. But he was even-tempered, placid, and studious not to give offence.

It has already been indicated that the great work performed by Descartes was, like that of Bacon, the promulgation of a new method. This was rendered necessary by their separation from the ancient philosophy and their exclusion of authority. If inquiry is to be independent, if reason is to walk alone, in what direction must she walk? Having relinquished the aid of the Church, there were but two courses open: the one to tread once more in the path of the ancients, and to endeavor by the ancient methods to attain the truth; or else to open a new path, to invent a new method. The former was barely possible. The spirit of the age was deeply imbued with a feeling of opposition against the ancient methods; and Descartes himself had been painfully perplexed by the universal anarchy and uncertainty which prevailed. The second course was therefore chosen.

Uncertainty was the disease of the epoch. Scepticism was widespread, and even the most confident dogmatism could offer no criterion of certitude. This want of criterion we saw leading, in Greece, to scepticism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, the New Academy, and finally leading the Alexandrians into the province of faith, to escape from the dilemma. The question of a criterion had long been the vital question of philosophy. Descartes could get no answer to it from the doctors of his day. Unable to find firm ground on any of the prevalent systems, distracted by doubts, mistrusting the conclusions of his own understanding, mistrusting the evidences of his senses, he determined to make a _tabula rasa_, and reconstruct his knowledge. He resolved to examine the premises of every conclusion, and to believe nothing but upon the clearest evidence of reason; evidence so convincing that he could not by any effort refuse to assent to it.

He has given us the detailed history of his doubts. He has told us how he found that he could plausibly enough doubt of everything except of his own existence. He pushed his scepticism to the verge of self-annihilation. There he stopped; there in self, in his consciousness, he found at last an irresistible fact, an irreversible certainty.

Firm ground was discovered. He could doubt the existence of the external world, and treat it as a phantasm; he could doubt the existence of a God, and treat the belief as a superstition; but of the existing of his thinking, doubting mind no sort of doubt was possible. He, the doubter, existed if nothing else existed. The existence that was revealed in his own consciousness was the primary fact, the first indubitable certainty. Hence his famous "_Cogito, ergo sum_" ("I think, therefore I am").

It is somewhat curious, and, as an illustration of the frivolous verbal disputes of philosophers, not a little instructive, that this celebrated "_Cogito, ergo sum_," should have been frequently attacked for its logical imperfection. It has been objected, from Gassendi downward, that to say, "I think, therefore I am," is a begging of the question; since existence has to be proved identical with thought. Certainly, if Descartes had intended to prove his own existence by reasoning, he would have been guilty of the _petitio principii_ Gassendi attributes to him, viz., that the major premise, "that which thinks exists," is assumed, not proved. But he did not intend this. What was his object? He has told us that it was to find a starting-point from which to reason--to find an irreversible certainty. And where did he find this? In his own consciousness. Doubt as I may, I cannot doubt of my own existence, because my very doubt reveals to me a something which doubts. You may call this an assumption, if you will: I will point out the fact as one above and beyond all logic; which logic can neither prove nor disprove; but which must always remain an irreversible certainty, and as such a fitting basis of philosophy.

I exist. No doubt can darken such a truth; no sophism can confute this clear principle. This is a certainty, if there be none other. This is the basis of all science. It is in vain to ask for a proof of that which is self-evident and irresistible. I exist. The consciousness of my existence is to me the assurance of my existence.

Had Descartes done no more than point out this fact he would have no claim to notice here; and we are surprised to find many writers looking upon this "_Cogito, ergo sum_" as constituting the great idea in his system. Surely it is only a statement of universal experience--an epigrammatic form given to the common-sense view of the matter. Any clown would have told him that the assurance of his existence was his consciousness of it; but the clown would not have stated it so well. He would have said, "I know I exist, because I feel that I exist."

Descartes therefore made no discovery in pointing out this fact as an irreversible certainty. The part it plays in his system is only that of a starting-point. It makes consciousness the basis of all truth. There is none other possible. Interrogate consciousness, and its clear replies will be science. Here we have a new basis and a new philosophy introduced. It was indeed but another shape of the old formula, "Know thyself," so differently interpreted by Thales, Socrates, and the Alexandrians; but it gave that formula a precise signification, a thing it had before always wanted. Of little use could it be to tell man to know himself. How is he to know himself? By looking inward? We all do that. By examining the nature of his thoughts? That had been done without success. By examining the process of his thoughts? That, too, had been accomplished, and the logic of Aristotle was the result.

The formula needed a precise interpretation; and that interpretation Descartes gave. Consciousness, said he, is the basis of all knowledge; it is the only ground of absolute certainty. Whatever it distinctly proclaims must be true. The process, then, is simple: examine your consciousness, and its clear replies. Hence the vital portion of his system lies in this axiom: All clear ideas are true: whatever is clearly and distinctly conceived is true. This axiom he calls the foundation of all science, the rule and measure of truth.

The next step to be taken was to determine the rules for the proper detection of these ideas; and these rules he has laid down as follows:

1. Never accept anything as true but what is evidently so; to admit nothing but what so clearly and distinctly presents itself as true that there can be no reason to doubt it.

2. To divide every question into as many separate questions as possible; that each part being more easily conceived, the whole may be more intelligible--(Analysis).

3. To conduct the examination with order, beginning by that of objects the most simple, and therefore the easiest to be known, and ascending little by little up to knowledge of the most complex--(Synthesis).

4. To make such exact calculations and such circumspections as to be confident that nothing essential has been omitted.

Consciousness, being the ground of all certainty, everything of which you are clearly and distinctly conscious must be true; everything which you clearly and distinctively conceive exists, if the idea of it involves existence.

In the four rules, and in this view of consciousness, we have only half of Descartes' system; the psychological half. It was owing to the exclusive consideration of this half that Dugald Stewart was led--in controverting Condorcet's assertion that Descartes had done more than either Galileo or Bacon toward experimental philosophy--to say that Condorcet would have been nearer the truth if he had pointed him out as the "Father of the Experimental Philosophy of the Mind." Perhaps the title is just; but Condorcet's praise, though exaggerated, was not without good foundation.

There is, in truth, another half of Descartes' system, equally important, or nearly so: we mean the deductive method. His eminence as a mathematician is universally recognized. He was the first to make the grand discovery of the application of algebra to geometry; and he made this at the age of twenty-three. The discovery that geometrical curves might be expressed by algebraical numbers, though highly important in the history of mathematics, only interests us here by leading us to trace his philosophical development. He was deeply engrossed in mathematics; he saw that mathematics were capable of a still further simplification and a far more extended application. Struck as he was with the certitude of mathematical reasoning, he began applying the principles of mathematical reasoning to the subject of metaphysics. His great object was, amid the scepticism and anarchy of his contemporaries, to found a system which should be solid and convincing. He first wished to find a basis of certitude--a starting-point: this he found in consciousness. He next wished to find a method of certitude: this he found in mathematics.

"Those long chains of reasoning," he tells us, "all simple and easy, which geometers use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations, suggested to me that all things which came within human knowledge must follow each other in a similar chain; and that provided we abstain from admitting anything as true which is not so, and that we always preserve in them the order necessary to deduce one from the other, there can be none so remote to which we cannot finally attain, nor so obscure but that we may discover them." From these glimpses of the twofold nature of Descartes' method, it will be easy to see into his whole system: consciousness being the only ground of certitude, mathematics the only method of certitude.

We may say therefore that the deductive method was now completely constituted. The whole operation of philosophy henceforth consisted in deducing consequences. The premises had been found; the conclusions alone were wanting. This was held to be true of physics no less than of psychology. Thus, in his _Principia_, he announces his intention of giving a short account of the principal phenomena of the world, not that we may use them as reasons to prove anything; for he adds: "we desire to deduce effects from causes, not from effects; but only in order that out of the innumerable effects which we learn to be capable of resulting from the same causes, we may determine our minds to consider these rather than others."

SIEGE OF LA ROCHELLE

RICHELIEU RULES FRANCE

A.D. 1627

ANDREW D. WHITE

Through the work which Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of Louis XIII, performed for that monarch and for France, the country was lifted from a state of comparative disorganization and weakness, and started on a fresh career, which led her to the foremost position among European nations.

At the death of Henry IV, in 1610, his son Louis XIII was but nine years old, and from 1624 to the end of the reign, in 1643, Richelieu directed the policy of France. By crushing the Huguenots as a political party he prepared the way for building up the power of the King. The Huguenots were aiming at an independent Protestant commonwealth within the kingdom. When Richelieu had defeated this project by his victory at La Rochelle he was free to undertake a readjustment of the relations between the throne and the grasping nobles. After accomplishing this he could turn his attention to foreign affairs.

In the last stage of the Thirty Years' War France under Richelieu played her part so well that the house of Austria was humbled, and, although the great Cardinal died before the end of the war, in the final settlement France received territorial and political benefits which greatly added to her prestige.

White, our eminent historian, educator, and diplomatist, has given to the world, in the following narrative and analysis, the best account of Richelieu's administration to be found in English.

Thus far the struggles of the world have developed its statesmanship after three leading types.

First of these is that based on faith in some great militant principle. Strong among statesmen of this type, in this time, stand Cavour, with his faith in constitutional liberty; Cobden, with his faith in freedom of trade; the third Napoleon, with his faith that the world moves, and that a successful policy must keep the world's pace.

The second style of statesmanship is seen in the reorganization of old states to fit new times. In this the chiefs are such men as Cranmer and Turgot.

But there is a third class of statesmen sometimes doing more brilliant work than either of the others. These are they who serve a state in times of chaos--in times when a nation is by no means ripe for revolution, but only stung by desperate revolt. These are they who are quick enough and firm enough to bind all the good forces of the state into one cosmic force, therewith to compress or crush all chaotic forces; these are they who throttle treason and stab rebellion; who fear not, when defeat must send down misery through ages, to insure victory by using weapons of the hottest and sharpest. Theirs, then, is a statesmanship which it may be well for the leading men of this land and time to be looking at and thinking of, and its representative man shall be Richelieu.

Never perhaps did a nation plunge more suddenly from the height of prosperity into the depth of misery than did France on May 14, 1610, when Henry IV fell dead by the dagger of Ravaillac. All earnest men, in a moment, saw the abyss yawning--felt the state sinking--felt themselves sinking with it. And they did what in such a time men always do: first all shrieked, then every man clutched at the means of safety nearest him. Sully, Henry's great minister, rode through the streets of Paris with big tears streaming down his face; strong men whose hearts had been toughened and crusted in the dreadful religious wars sobbed like children; all the populace swarmed abroad bewildered--many swooned--some went mad. This was the first phase of feeling.

Then came a second phase yet more terrible. For now burst forth that old whirlwind of anarchy and bigotry and selfishness and terror which Henry had curbed during twenty years. All earnest men felt bound to protect themselves, and seized the nearest means of defence. Sully shut himself up in the Bastille, and sent orders to his son-in-law, the Duke of Rohan, to bring in six thousand soldiers to protect the Protestants. All unearnest men, especially the great nobles, rushed to the court, determined now, that the only guardians of the state were a weak-minded woman and a weak-bodied child, to dip deep into the treasury which Henry had filled to develop the nation, and to wrench away the power which he had built to guard the nation.

In order to make ready for this grasp at the state treasure and power by the nobles, the Duke of Épernon--from the corpse of the King by whose side he was sitting when Ravaillac struck him--strides into the Parliament of Paris and orders it to declare the late Queen, Marie de' Medici, regent; and when this Parisian court, knowing full well that it had no right to confer the regency, hesitated, he laid his hand on his sword, and declared that, unless they did his bidding at once, his sword should be drawn from its scabbard. This threat did its work. Within three hours after the King's death the Paris Parliament, which had no right to give it, bestowed the regency on a woman who had no capacity to take it.

At first things seemed to brighten a little. The Queen Regent sent such urgent messages to Sully that he left his stronghold of the Bastille and went to the palace. She declared to him before the assembled court that he must govern France still. With tears she gave the young King into his arms, telling Louis that Sully was his father's best friend, and bidding him pray the old statesman to serve the state yet longer.

But soon this good scene changed. Mary had a foster-sister, Leonora Galligai, and Leonora was married to an Italian adventurer, Concini. These seemed a poor couple, worthless and shiftless, their only stock in trade Leonora's Italian cunning; but this stock soon came to be of vast account, for thereby she soon managed to bind and rule the Queen Regent--managed to drive Sully into retirement in less than a year--managed to make herself and her husband the great dispensers at court of place and pelf. Penniless though Concini had been, he was in a few months able to buy the Marquisate of Ancre, which cost him nearly a half a million livres; and, soon after, the post of first gentleman of the bedchamber, and that cost him nearly a quarter of a million; and, soon after that, a multitude of broad estates and high offices at immense prices. Leonora also was not idle; among her many gains was the bribe of three hundred thousand livres to screen certain financiers under trial for fraud.

Next came the turn of the great nobles. For ages the nobility of France had been the worst among her many afflictions. From age to age attempts had been made to curb them. In the fifteenth century Charles VII had done much to undermine their power, and Louis XI had done much to crush it. But strong as was the policy of Charles, and cunning as was the policy of Louis, they had made one omission, and that omission left France, though advanced, miserable. For these monarchs had not cut the root of the evil. The French nobility continued practically a serf-holding nobility.

Despite, then, the curb put upon many old pretensions of the nobles, the serf-owning spirit continued to spread a network of curses over every arm of the French government, over every acre of the French soil, and, worst of all, over the hearts and minds of the French people. Enterprise was deadened, invention crippled. Honesty was nothing, honor everything. Life was of little value. Labor was the badge of servility; laziness the very badge and passport of gentility. The serf-owning spirit was an iron wall between noble and not noble--the only unyielding wall between France and prosperous peace.

But the serf-owning spirit begat another evil far more terrible: it begat a substitute for patriotism--a substitute which crushed out patriotism just at the very emergencies when patriotism was most needed. For the first question which in any state emergency sprang into the mind of a French noble was not, How does this affect the welfare of the nation? but, How does this affect the position of my order? The serf-owning spirit developed in the French aristocracy an instinct which led them in national troubles to guard the serf-owning class first and the nation afterward, and to acknowledge fealty to the serf-owning interest first and to the national interest afterward.

So it proved in that emergency at the death of Henry. Instead of planting themselves as a firm bulwark between the state and harm, the Duke of Épernon, the Prince of Condé, the Count of Soissons, the Duke of Guise, the Duke of Bouillon, and many others, wheedled or threatened the Queen into granting pensions of such immense amounts that the great treasury filled by Henry and Sully with such noble sacrifices, and to such noble ends, was soon nearly empty.

But as soon as the treasury began to run low the nobles began a worse work. Mary had thought to buy their loyalty, but when they had gained such treasures their ideas mounted higher. A saying of one among them became their formula, and became noted: "The day of kings is past; now is come the day of the grandees."

Every great noble now tried to grasp some strong fortress or rich city. One fact will show the spirit of many. The Duke of Épernon had served Henry as governor of Metz, and Metz was the most important fortified town in France; therefore Henry, while allowing D'Épernon the honor of governorship, had always kept a royal lieutenant in the citadel, who corresponded directly with the ministry. But on the very day of the King's death D'Épernon despatched commands to his own creatures at Metz to seize the citadel, and to hold it for him against all other orders.

But at last even Mary had to refuse to lavish more of the national treasure and to shred more of the national territory among these magnates. Then came their rebellion.

Immediately Condé and several great nobles issued a proclamation denouncing the tyranny and extravagance of the court--calling on the Catholics to rise against the Regent in behalf of their religion--calling on the Protestants to rise in behalf of theirs--summoning the whole people to rise against the waste of their state treasure.

It was all a glorious joke. To call on the Protestants was wondrous impudence, for Condé had left their faith and had persecuted them. To call on the Catholics was not less impudent, for he had betrayed their cause scores of times; but to call on the whole people to rise in defence of their treasury was impudence sublime, for no man had besieged the treasury more persistently, no man had dipped into it more deeply, than Condé himself.

The people saw this and would not stir. Condé could rally only a few great nobles and their retainers, and therefore, as a last tremendous blow to the court, he and his followers raised the cry that the Regent must convoke the States-General.