Quotes from Roger Ariew

understanding they in their turn have played on them. Our soul sometimes takes its own revenge: <> What we see and hear when agitated by anger we do not see as it is:

The object we love seems to us more beautiful than it is:

Our senses are not only altered, but often stupefied by the passions of the soul.

It seems the soul retreats into itself and smiles at the powers of the senses. And so both the inside and the outside of man are full of weakness and falsehood.

Is it our senses that lend the subject these different conditions, while the subjects nevertheless have only one? That is what we see in the bread we eat; it is only bread, but our use makes of it bones, blood, flesh, hair, and nails:

Now since our condition accommodates things to itself and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know what things are in truth; for nothing comes to us except as falsified and altered by our senses.

The uncertainty of our senses makes uncertain all that they produce:

For the rest, who can be fit to judge of these differences? As we say of debates about religion, that we need a judge who is not attached to one or the other side, exempt from choice or affection, which is not possible among Christians, so it is likewise in this case.

so that age and subsequent generation always go on destroying and spoiling what went before:

And then we stupidly fear one kind of death, while we have already passed and are passing so many others.

Nor can man raise himself above himself and humanity, for he cannot see but with his eyes nor grasp except with his grip. He will raise himself if God extraordinarily gives him his hand; he will raise himself, abandoning and renouncing his own means, and letting himself be lifted and sustained by purely celestial ones. <>

24. It cannot be that axioms established by argumentation should avail for the discovery of new works, for the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument. But axioms duly and orderly formed from particulars easily discover the way to new particulars, and thus render sciences active.

26. The conclusions of human reasoning as ordinarily applied in matters of nature, I call for the sake of distinction anticipations of nature (as something rash or premature). That reason which is elicited from facts by a just and methodical process, I call interpretation of nature.

39. There are four classes of idols that beset men's minds. To these for distinction's sake I have assigned names, calling the first class idols of the tribe; the second, idols of the cave; the third, idols of the market place; the fourth, idols of the theater.

Descartes does not champion induction, and, although he advances the corpuscularian or mechanical philosophy to the extent that he reduces physical objects to matter in motion, he makes it clear that he does not accept the reality of atoms as ultimate indivisible constituents of

Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to state that all of modern philosophy constitutes reactions to and criticisms of Descartes' Meditations.

stimulated in us, the mere presence of corpuscles of flame is not by itself sufficient, and since movement is required in addition, it is with considerable reason that I declare motion to be the cause of heat.

But all knowledge is conveyed to us by the senses: they are our masters:

Knowledge begins through them and is

resolved into them.

Here is the platform and principle of the whole structure of our knowledge. <> He who could push me into contradicting the senses would have me by the throat; he could not push me further back. The senses are the beginning and the end of human knowledge:

all our instruction is routed by their means and mediation.

The first consideration I have on the subject of the senses is that I doubt that man is provided with all the natural senses.

For if some sense is lacking, our reasoning cannot discover the defect. It is the privilege of the senses to be the extreme limit of our awareness; there is nothing beyond them that can help us discover them, no more than one sense can discover another