"Meditations On First Philosophy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Descartes Rene)

venture to promise that it will be difficult for anyone to
bring to mind criticisms of any consequence which have not
been already touched upon. This is why I beg those who read
these Meditations to form no judgment upon them unless they
have given themselves the trouble to read all the objections
as well as the replies which I have made to them.6

Synopsis of the Six Following Meditations.



In the first Meditation I set forth the reasons for which
we may, generally speaking, doubt about all things and
especially about material things, at least so long as we have
no other foundations for the sciences than those which we have
hitherto possessed. But although the utility of a Doubt which
is so general does not at first appear, it is at the same time
very great, inasmuch as it delivers us from every kind of
prejudice, and sets out for us a very simple way by which the
mind may detach itself from the senses; and finally it makes
it impossible for us ever to doubt those things which we have
once discovered to be true.

In the second Meditation, mind, which making use of the
liberty which pertains to it, takes for granted that all those
things of whose existence it has the least doubt, are non-
existent, recognises that it is however absolutely impossible
that it does not itself exist. This point is likewise of the
greatest moment, inasmuch as by this means a distinction is
easily drawn between the things which pertain to mindеthat is
to say to the intellectual natureеand those which pertain to
body.

But because it may be that some expect from me in this
place a statement of the reasons establishing the immortality
of the soul, I feel that I should here make known to them that
having aimed at writing nothing in all this Treatise of which
I do not possess very exact demonstrations, I am obliged to
follow a similar order to that made use of by the geometers,
which is to begin by putting forward as premises all those
things upon which the proposition that we seek depends, before
coming to any conclusion regarding it. Now the first and
principal matter which is requisite for thoroughly
understanding the immortality of the soul is to form the
clearest possible conception of it, and one which will be
entirely distinct from all the conceptions which we may have
of body; and in this Meditation this has been done. In
addition to this it is requisite that we may be assured that
all the things which we conceive clearly and distinctly are
true in the very way in which we think them; and this could