* * * * * It is not patriotism, it is a profound sentiment of truth and justice, which makes us place the whole philosophy now expanded in the world under the invocation of the name of Descartes. Yes, the whole of modern philosophy is the work of this great man, for it owes to him the spirit that animates it, and the method that constitutes its power. After the downfall of scholasticism and the mournful disruptures of the sixteenth century, the first object which the bold good sense of Descartes proposed to itself was to make philosophy a human science, like astronomy, physiology, medicine, subject to the same uncertainties and to the same aberrations, but capable also of the same progress. Descartes encountered the skepticism spread on every side in the train of so many revolutions, ambitious hypotheses, born out of the first use of an ill-regulated liberty, and the old formulas surviving the ruins of scholasticism. In his courageous passion for truth, he resolved to reject, provisorily at least, all the ideas that hitherto he had received without controlling them, firmly decided not to admit any but those which, after a serious examination, might appear to him evident. But he perceived that there was one thing which he could not reject, even provisorily, in his universal doubt,--that thing was the existence itself of his doubt, that is to say, of his thought; for although all the rest might be only an illusion, this fact, that he thought, could not be an illusion. Descartes, therefore, stopped at this fact, of an irresistible evidence, as at the first truth which he could accept without fear. Recognizing at the same time that thought is the necessary instrument of all the investigations which he might propose to himself, as well as the instrument of the human race in the acquisition of its natural knowledges,[4] he devoted himself to a regular study of it, to the analysis of thought as the condition of all legitimate philosophy, and upon this solid foundation he reared a doctrine of a character at once certain and living, capable of resisting skepticism, exempt from hypotheses, and affranchised from the formulas of the schools. Thus the analysis of thought, and of the mind which is the subject of it, that is to say, psychology, has become the point of departure, the most general principle, the important method of modern philosophy.[5]