The method of English empiricism, which consisted, after Bacon, in looking at the exterior world with wide open eyes to get a notion of reality based on sense knowledge, was taken up in France with as much enthusiasm as the theories of Descartes were taken up in England. The two countries balanced each other, France tending to the unity of man’s consciousness, England to the full realisation of the world of senses. Life obviously is neither of these but their combination or more properly their synthesis. So that the mutual influence of both countries is the best illustration of the life of mind, single in its development, multiform in its manifestation. What is tragic in the philosophy of Descartes is almost perfectly illustrated in his own life. No one has more eloquently proclaimed the subjectivity of life and reality than he has through his own scholarly selfishness. Only Louis XIV could be his rival in this self-assertion. The self-centred monarch, the self-centred scholar, can vie with each other. Therefore he may be held to be just as anti-religious and anti-historical as Louis XIV; the one could not forget the majesty, the other the genius, with which he felt himself invested to bow down in worship of the King of Kings, in worship of the Word of eternal thought. Yet both were believers and convinced Roman Catholics. The contradiction of fact thus introduced in their lives find its most exquisite expression in the vow of Descartes, when he pledged himself to make a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Loreto if he could get rid of all the duties that fell to him as a soldier, as a man of the world. They prevented him from attending freely to the satisfaction of his longing for scientific researches. Hence his impatience to retire from this vast world, full of rights and duties, where men suffer and require help and love. The anti-religiousness of such feeling need not be emphasised, it is obviously worse than that of many people who, calling themselves atheists, were drawn into deifying nature or their own negation of God!