Firstly, that they have never read the proofs arrayed against Sir Philip Francis; this is the general case.

Secondly, that, according to Sancho's proverb, they want better bread than is made of wheat. They are not content with proofs or absolute demonstrations. They require you, like the witch of Endor, to raise Sir Philip from the grave, that they may cross-examine him.

Thirdly (and this is the fault of the able writer who unmasked Sir Philip), there happened to be the strongest argument that ever picked a Bramah lock against the unknown writer of "Junius"; apply this, and if it fits the wards, oh, Gemini! my dear friend, but you are right-righter-rightest; you have caught Junius" in a rabbit snare.

Complete. From De Quincey's

posthumous works.

RENÈ DESCARTES

(1596-1650)

ENÉ DESCARTES, one of the greatest philosophers and mathematicians of Europe, was born at La Haye, France, March 31st, 1596. After graduating at the Jesuit College of La Flèche, he spent five years in Paris and eleven years in traveling, or, in the life of a soldier, witnessing the horrors of the wars with which Europe was then being wasted as a result of the growth of power of the people and the attempt to maintain the feudal system against it. At thirty-three, Descartes, convinced of the pressing need of intellect in the world to hold such brutality in check, retired to Holland determined to think out a way to higher civilization. "Je pense· donc je suis »*— “I think - hence I exist," is the basis of his system, and it means much more than a mere statement of fact, for the system of Descartes, logically interpreted, makes the reality of existence depend on thought, and cease when thought ceases. Very early in life Descartes had formed a habit of profound meditation, and he relied on it for results rather than on scholarship. In the ordinary sense he was not a scholar, for he did not seek knowledge through assimilating the thoughts of others, but through stimulating his own. The deduction from his reasoning is that if real thought is actually persisted in, it must lead to a knowledge of truth, no matter what the starting point. "I think-therefore I exist"—by beginning to become conscious, step by step, of everything in the universe. That is, the individual mind in thinking takes hold on the universal mind progressively, as it takes hold of the phenomena of nature in the visible universe through which the universal mind manifests itself. Hence the individual mind, existing because it thinks, exists in the universal order, and the individual thought demonstrates the universal. Descartes reasoned that under all complexities which result from the attempt to group and define the infinite order of the universe, there are primitive simplicities recognized by the mind as self-evident, absolute truths, the keys of all the rest. His effort was to teach a method of reaching these with certainty, and the object of the "Meditations" and "The Discourse on Method" was "to find a simple and indecomposable point or absolute element which gives to the world and thought their order and systematization." In "Cogito, ergo sum.»*

RENÉ DESCARTES.

After the Portrait by Frans Hals in the Gallery of the Louvre, engraved by W. Holl.

RANS HALS, one of the most famous of the Classical Dutch Portrait Painters, was born in 1580 at Antwerp, and died at Haarlem, in the Netherlands, in 1666. He was a contemporary of Descartes

who lived in Holland from 1629 to 1649.