time when Bacon was like
the morning sun, rising to shed new rays of bright light over the then
dark world of philosophy. The mother of Des Cartes died while he was but
a few days old, and himself a sickly child, he began to take part in
the battle of life with but little appearance of ever possessing the
capability for action on the minds of his fellows, which he afterwards
so fully exercised. Debarred, however, by his physical weakness from
many boyish pursuits, he devoted himself to study in his earliest years,
and during his youth gained the title of the young philosopher, from
his eagerness to learn, and from his earnest endeavors by inquiry
and experiment to solve every problem presented to his notice. He was
educated in the Jesuits' College of La Fleche; and the monument erected
to him at Stockholm informs us, "That having mastered all the learning
of the schools, which proved short of his expectations, he betook
himself to the army in Germany and Hungary, and there spent his vacant
winter hours in comparing the mysteries and phenomena of nature with the
laws of mathematics, daring to hope that the one might serve as a key
to the other. Quitting, therefore, all other pursuits, he retired to a
little village near Egmont, in Holland, where spending twenty-five years
in continual reading and meditation, he effected his design."

In his celebrated "Discourse on Method," he says,--"As soon as my age
permitted me to leave my preceptors, I entirely gave up the study of
letters; and, resolving to seek no other science than that which I could
find in myself, or else in the great book of the world, I employed
the remainder of my youth in travel--in seeing courts and camps--in
frequenting people of diverse humors and conditions--in collecting
various experiences; and, above all, in endeavoring to draw some
profitable reflection from what I saw. For it seemed to me that I should
meet with more truth in the reasonings which each man makes in his own
affairs, and which, if wrong, would be speedily punished by failure,
than in those reasonings which the philosopher makes in his study upon
speculations which produce no effect, and which are of no consequence
to him, except perhaps that he will be the more vain of them, the more
remote they are from common sense, because he would then have been
forced to employ more ingenuity and subtlety to render them plausible."

At the age of thirty-three Des Cartes retired from the world for