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The voices / 36 fragments

René Descartes

1596 AD — 1650 AD

Descartes examines his education and proposes changing his desires before trying to change fortune. His provisional rules concern how to act while inquiry continues, rather than a guarantee of complete mental control.

Author and source reference ↗
▷ Play this voiceSearch within this voice ↗Place in time ↗lifetruthtimenaturefaithmindpeacejustice

Life and writing

The catalogue identifies René Descartes with lifetime years 1596–1650 and credits John Veitch for this English translation of the Discourse on the Method. Ilana and Greg Newby receive digital credits. The work moves between an account of education, rules for inquiry and provisional conduct. Its catalogue HTML ISBN identifies the electronic edition. No print publisher or quotation composition date is established by the catalogue record.

Project Gutenberg catalogue — Discourse on the Method ↗Checked related reading — Discourse on the Method ↗ Catalogue identity/lifetime and linked edition credits, framing or cast

Part I recounts Descartes’s assessment of what he learned, including his rejection of claims associated with alchemists, astrologers and magicians. This is his retrospective judgment about knowledge, rather than a full survey of every practice bearing those names. Part III presents the maxim that he should conquer himself rather than fortune and change his desires rather than the world. The sentence about thoughts being within his power belongs to that provisional morality. It is not a clinical claim that unwanted thoughts are always voluntarily controllable. The two selected extracts match Veitch’s linked English text.

Checked related reading — Discourse on the Method ↗ Part III; third maxim of provisional morality; Part I; assessment of education and alleged sciences

Reading this voice

Read Part III’s third maxim with its account of efforts and outcomes, then compare Part I’s scrutiny of education. Keep the distinction between rules for living during inquiry and conclusions established by the inquiry itself.

Subjects to explore

Editorial reading connections, distinct from the archive’s word matching.

minddoubtself-control

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Editorial starting points from this author’s existing entries.

Profile sources and editorial status

Original agent-assisted editorial profile, checked 2026-10-05. No human review is recorded. Life dates are recorded to the year; they do not date individual quotations.

Archive entries

01Undated
I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than the increasing discovery of my own ignorance. Multiplicity of laws often furnishes excuses for evil doing. Sometimes is very difficult to untangle the truth. By the name God I understand a substance that is infinite [eternal, immutable], independent, all knowing, all powerful, and by which I myself and everything else, if anything else exist, have been created. We can conceive nothing that is extended as being so small as not to be capable of being divided, in thought at least. The present time has no causal dependence on the time immediately preceding it. Our errors are defects of our mode of auction, but not of our nature; and that the faults of subordinates may often be attributed to other masters, but never to God. The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries. Common sense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it. If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things. .
René Descartes / quote
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07Undated
although we very clearly see the sun, we ought not therefore to determine that it is only of the size which our sense of sight presents; and we may very distinctly imagine the head of a lion joined to the body of a goat, without being therefore shut up to the conclusion that a chimaera exists; for it is not a dictate of reason that what we thus see or imagine is in reality existent; but it plainly tells us that all our ideas or notions contain in them some truth.
René Descartes / quote
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