René Descartes

Life and writing

The catalogue identifies René Descartes with lifetime years 1596–1650 and credits John Veitch for this English translation of the Discourse on the Method. Ilana and Greg Newby receive digital credits. The work moves between an account of education, rules for inquiry and provisional conduct. Its catalogue HTML ISBN identifies the electronic edition. No print publisher or quotation composition date is established by the catalogue record.

Part I recounts Descartes’s assessment of what he learned, including his rejection of claims associated with alchemists, astrologers and magicians. This is his retrospective judgment about knowledge, rather than a full survey of every practice bearing those names. Part III presents the maxim that he should conquer himself rather than fortune and change his desires rather than the world. The sentence about thoughts being within his power belongs to that provisional morality. It is not a clinical claim that unwanted thoughts are always voluntarily controllable. The two selected extracts match Veitch’s linked English text.

Reading this voice

Read Part III’s third maxim with its account of efforts and outcomes, then compare Part I’s scrutiny of education. Keep the distinction between rules for living during inquiry and conclusions established by the inquiry itself.

Subjects to explore

Words to begin with

• Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
• And, in fine, of false sciences I thought I knew the worth sufficiently to escape being deceived by the professions of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a magician, or by the artifices and boasting of any of those who profess to know things of which they are ignorant.