Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th Ed.
Language: English
Pages: 128
ISBN: 0872204200
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This edition contains Donald Cress's completely revised translation of the Meditations (from the corrected Latin edition) and recent corrections to Discourse on Method, bringing this version even closer to Descartes's original, while maintaining the clear and accessible style of a classic teaching edition.
more innocent joys in this life; and discovering daily, by its means, truths which seemed of some importance and generally unknown to other men, the satisfaction I obtained from it so filled my mind that nothing else mattered to me. Besides, the three foregoing maxims were based only on the design I had to continue to learn. For, God having given each of us some light of reason to discern true from false, I could not have believed I ought to content myself for one moment with the opinions of
appear in the mines, and plants grow in the countryside, and in general, how all the bodies one calls mixed or composite could be engendered. And, among other things, because, apart from the stars, I knew nothing in the world except fire which produces light, I strove to make clearly understood everything belonging to its nature, how it is made, how it is fed, how sometimes there is only heat without light, and sometimes only light without heat; how it can introduce different colours into
which fell under taste, smell, sight, touch or hearing, is changed, and yet the same wax remains. Perhaps it was what I now think, namely, that the wax was not the sweetness of honey, or the pleasant smell of flowers, the whiteness, or the shape, nor the sound, but only a body which a little earlier appeared to me in these forms, and which is now to be perceived in other forms. But to speak precisely, what is it that I imagine when I conceive it in this way? Let us consider it attentively, and
this moment some cause produces and creates me anew, so to speak, that is to say, conserves me. In truth, it is quite clear and evident to all those who will attentively consider the nature of time, that a substance, in order to be conserved in each moment of its duration, needs the same power and action that would be necessary to produce and create it afresh, if it did not yet exist. So that the natural light shows us clearly that conservation and creation differ only in regard to our mode of
concomitant of ‘I think’. Thus it is that Descartes can formulate a judgement of existence: I exist as a thinking being. The Cogito is a first principle from which Descartes will now deduce all that follows. He has a clear and distinct conception of the fact that he exists; he can therefore believe that whatever else he perceives with the same clarity and distinction is equally true. Moreover, he knows himself only as a dunking being, he is therefore assured that the soul and the body are