When the autumn came again I returned to college more inclined than ever for the life of a scholar. I fell to my studies with renewed zeal, and would doubtless have killed myself with work had I not been nearly killed with the fever, which made me more careful of my health. And now, like the weathercock I was, my beliefs shifted yet again. For studying the schoolmen, who were the great upholders of Aristotle, I found in them so many contradictions and phantasies which they fathered on their master that, after reading the diatribes of Peter Ramus and others against him, I was almost persuaded that I had been grievously misled. Then, at last, I saw hat the fault lay not in Aristotle but in his followers, who sought to find in him things that were beyond the compass of his thought. So by degrees I came round toward the new philosophy, which a party in the college upheld. They swore by the great names of Bacon and Galileo and the other natural philosophers, but I hesitated to follow them, for they seemed to me to disdain all mental philosophy, which I hold is the greater study. I was of this way of thinking when I fell in one day with an English book, a translation of a work by a Frenchman, one Renatus Descartes, published in London in the year 1649. It gave an account of the progress in philosophy of this man, who followed no school, but, clearing his mind of all presuppositions, instituted a method for himself. This marked for me the turning point; for I gave in my allegiance without hesitation to this philosopher, and ever since I have held by his system with some modifications. It is needless for me to enter further into my philosophy, for I have by me a written exposition of the works of this Descartes with my own additions, which I intend, if God so please, to give soon to the world. For two years I abode at the college, thinking that I was destined by nature for a studious life, and harbouring thoughts of going to the university of Saumur to complete my studies. I thought that my spirit was chastened to a fit degree, and so no doubt it was, for those who had feared me at first on account of my heavy fist and straightforward ways, now openly scoffed at me without fear of punishment. Indeed, one went so far one day as to jostle me off the causeway, and I made no return, but went on as if nothing had happened, deeming it beneath a wise man to be distracted by mundane trifles. Yet, mind you, in all this there was nothing Christian or like unto the meekness of our Master, as I have seen in some men; but rather an absurd attempt to imitate those who would have lived very differently had their lot been cast in our hot and turbid days.