The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Even as a young man Descartes had begun to distrust the foundations of everything he had been taught, except mathe- matics. This skepticism (which did not conflict, it appears, with conventional piety) was reinforced during his Paris and Poitiers years (1614-18) when he read Montaigne [37]. He finally abandoned study and set off on a career of mild military adven- ture and travei. He was resolved, he says, "no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world.^,>

His great creative years, from 1629 to 1649, were spent mainly in Holland, at that time a general asylum for intelli- gence. His fame grew to such proportions that Queen Christina of Sweden invited (that is, commanded) him to visit her and teach her philosophy. In Sweden Descartes was forced to rise at 5:00 a.m. in cold weather in order to converse with the queen. A few months of such barbarism were enough to kill him. Had not this arrogant monarch caused his death just as directly as if she had shot him, the world might have had another twenty years of Descartes^ mind.

However, he managed to do pretty well. Though the two talents were inextricably connected, Descartes was an even greater mathematician than philosopher. One morning, while lying in bed, he hit upon the idea of coordinate geometry, which married algebra to geometry. He also worked in physics, though with less distinction.

Descartes^ doctrines, dualistic and materialist in tendency, are both interesting and influential. But it is as the creator of a new, or at any rate fresh, method of thought that his position was secured. He threw aside much, though not ali, of scholas- tic reasoning and, as it were, started from scratch. He began by doubting everything. The progression of doubt, however, ended at the point where he found that he could not doubt the existence of his own thought. "I think, therefore I am" is the famous formula with which he begins. (In a somewhat differ­ent form, it is found in Augustine [22], too, but Descartes made it do work and Augustine didn^.) He then proceeds to build a system of thought, using four main principies you will find described in his Discourse on Method. "Cartesian doubt," however, describes not only a method but an attitude of mind, and this attitude was to influence profoundly post-Cartesian speculation, whether scientific or philosophical.

We read Descartes, then, as the first supremely great mind to receive its stimulus from the new physics and astronomy of Copernicus, Galileo [42], and others. He incorporates the out­look of the tremendous renaissance of science, partly contem- porary with him, that was to reach a high point with Newton.

C.F.

JOHN MILTON

1608-1674

Paradise Lost, Lycidas, On the Moming of Christ's Nativity, Sonnets, Areopagitica

Miltons life opened on a fair prospect and closed in darkness. At Chrisfs College, Cambridge, the delicate-featured boy was called, half in scorn, half in admiration, "The Lady of Chrisfs." He found his vocation early: poetry and classical scholarship. A period of reading and study at his fathers country house (1632-38) was followed by a year or two of Continental travei. During this time he was a humanist not greatly different from other humanists of the Renaissance. Then carne twenty years of stormy political and religious controversy. Some magnificent prose resulted, but little happiness—and many may think these years a waste of his genius. Championing the Parliamentary cause, hating "the bishops," he served as Latin secretary to Cromwell for over a decade, overlaying his original humanism with Puritan doctrine. From his forty-third year to his death he was blind; none of his three marriages turned out well; and with the Restoration ali his political hopes and dreams were dashed. Nothing was left him but poetry and his personal Christianity, a kind of dissidence of dissent.

This was the man who wrote Paradise Lost, he and his widow receiving eighteen pounds for the effort of justifying the ways of God to men; who told us that poetry should be "sim- ple, sensuous, and passionate," but did not always follow his own prescription; whose Areopagitica is the classic defense of free speech and who fiercely supported CromwelPs rigid Puritan theocracy; whose views on divorce were three hundred years ahead of his time and whose views on women were those of a dimwitted barbarian; who was a master of the language and yet may be said to have written English as if it were Latin or Greek.

The average reader, approaching this unhappy Samson, meets two obstacles. The first is Milton. The second is Miltonese.