Des Cartes was under the middle size, and well proportioned, except that his head was rather too big for his body. His voice, owing to an hereditary weakness of the lungs, was unable to sustain any long conversation. He was very temperate, slept a good deal, and, as before noticed, wrote and thought much in bed. He was very particular in choosing his servants, engaging none but such as were both well-looking and intellectual; and several of his attendants afterwards rose in the world. Baillet mentions a physician, a Regius professor, a mathematician, and a judge, who had served Des Cartes in different capacities. He inherited from his mother an income of about 6000 livres a year. His expenses in experimenting were considerable, but he never would accept the offered assistance of his friends. He read little, and had few books. We have already noticed the obscure connection from which his daughter Francina derived her birth: he also paid his addresses to a lady, for whom he fought a duel with a rival. With these exceptions, he seems to have been insensible to female influence. He told the last-mentioned lady, somewhat bluntly, that he found nothing so beautiful as truth. He was a devout Catholic, and writers of that persuasion think that his doctrines were more favourable to them than those of Aristotle. His character as a philosopher is that of extraordinary power of imagination, which frequently carried him beyond all firm foundations. His ingenuity is very great; and had he been contemporary with Newton and Leibnitz, he might have been a third inventor of fluxions. Father Castel says of him, that he built high, and Newton[10] deep; that he had an ambition to create a world, and Newton none whatever. It is usual to compare these two great men; but we do not think them proper objects of comparison. Des Cartes lived at a time when the power of mathematical analysis was but small, compared with what he himself, Wallis, Newton, and others afterwards made it. He pursued his studies before Stevinus and Galileo had yet made the first additions to the mathematical mechanics of Archimedes. It is not, therefore, with Newton that he ought to be tried, but with those philosophers of his own age, who were in the same position with himself, and wrote upon similar subjects with similar methods. And here if we had room we could easily show, that, for variety of power, and comparative soundness of thinking, he was above all his contemporaries, and well deserves his fame. Footnote 10: The good Father first transcribed Newton, then read him twenty times, then wrote his comparison of the two, and kept it twenty years; and finally, decided that Des Cartes was the better philosopher, for the reasons given in the text. _Nous avons changé tout cela._