Part One

If this discourse seems too long to be read all at once, it may be divided into six parts. In the first will be found various considerations concerning the sciences. In the second, the principal rules of the method which the author has sought. In the third, some of the rules of morality which he has drawn from this method. In the fourth, the reasons by which he proves the existence of God and of the human soul, which are the foundations of his metaphysics. In the fifth, the order of the questions in physics which he has investigated, and in particular the explanation of the movement of the heart and of some other difficulties that belong to medicine; then also the difference between our soul and that of the beasts. And in the last, what things he believes are required in order to advance further in the investigation of nature than he has done, and what reasons have made him write.

Good sense is the most evenly shared thing in the world; for everyone thinks himself so well provided with it that even those who are hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they have. It is not likely that everyone is mistaken in this; rather, it shows that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false — which is properly what is called good sense or reason — is naturally equal in all men; and thus that the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some are more reasonable than others, but solely because we conduct our thoughts along different paths and do not consider the same things. For it is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to apply it well. The greatest souls are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues; and those who walk only very slowly can make much greater progress, if they always follow the straight road, than those who run and stray from it.

For my part, I have never presumed that my mind was in any way more perfect than that of the common run of men; indeed I have often wished to have as quick a thought, or as clear and distinct an imagination, or as ample or as ready a memory, as some others. And I know of no qualities other than these that serve the perfection of the mind; for as to reason, or sense, inasmuch as it is the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts, I am willing to believe that it is entire in each of us, and in this to follow the common opinion of the philosophers, who say that there is more and less only among accidents, and not among the forms or natures of the individuals of one and the same species.

But I shall not fear to say that I think I have had much good fortune in having found myself, from my youth, on certain paths which have led me to considerations and maxims from which I have formed a method; and by this method, it seems to me, I have the means of increasing my knowledge by degrees and of raising it little by little to the highest point which the mediocrity of my mind and the short span of my life will allow it to attain. For I have already reaped such fruits from it that — although in the judgements I make of myself I always try to lean towards distrust rather than presumption, and although, looking with a philosopher's eye on the various actions and undertakings of all men, there is hardly one that does not seem to me vain and useless — I cannot help feeling extreme satisfaction at the progress I think I have already made in the search for truth, and conceiving such hopes for the future that, if among the occupations of men as men there is one that is solidly good and important, I dare to believe that it is the one I have chosen.

Yet it may be that I am mistaken, and that what I take for gold and diamonds is perhaps only a little copper and glass. I know how subject we are to mistakes in what concerns ourselves, and also how much the judgements of our friends should be suspect to us when they are in our favour. But I shall be very glad to show in this discourse what paths I have followed, and to portray my life in it as in a picture, so that everyone may judge of it; and so that, learning from common report the opinions people have of it, this may be a new means of instructing myself, which I shall add to those I am accustomed to use.

Thus my purpose here is not to teach the method that everyone must follow in order to conduct his reason well, but only to show in what manner I have tried to conduct my own. Those who take it upon themselves to give precepts must think themselves more able than those to whom they give them; and if they fail in the least thing, they are to blame. But since I put forward this writing only as a history, or, if you prefer, as a fable, in which, among some examples that may be imitated, one will perhaps also find several others that one will be right not to follow, I hope that it will be useful to some without being harmful to anyone, and that all will be grateful to me for my frankness.

I was nourished on letters from my childhood; and because I was persuaded that by means of them one could acquire a clear and certain knowledge of all that is useful to life, I had an extreme desire to learn them. But as soon as I had completed the whole course of studies at the end of which one is usually received into the ranks of the learned, I entirely changed my opinion. For I found myself entangled in so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me I had gained nothing from trying to instruct myself, except that I had discovered more and more my ignorance. And yet I was at one of the most celebrated schools in Europe, where I thought there must be learned men if there were any anywhere on earth. I had learned there all that the others learned; and, not content with the sciences we were taught, I had even gone through all the books that had fallen into my hands treating of those sciences that are considered the most curious and rare. Besides this, I knew the judgements others made of me, and I did not see that I was thought inferior to my fellow students, although there were already among them some who were destined to fill the places of our masters. And finally our age seemed to me as flourishing and as fertile in good minds as any of the preceding ones. This made me take the liberty of judging all others by myself, and of thinking that there was no doctrine in the world such as I had previously been led to hope for.

I did not, however, cease to value the exercises with which one is occupied in the schools. I knew that the languages one learns there are necessary for understanding the books of the ancients; that the gracefulness of fables awakens the mind; that the memorable deeds of history elevate it, and that, read with discernment, they help to form the judgement; that the reading of all good books is like a conversation with the most honourable people of past centuries, who were their authors, and indeed a studied conversation, in which they reveal to us only the best of their thoughts; that eloquence has incomparable power and beauty; that poetry has the most ravishing delicacy and sweetness; that mathematics has very subtle inventions which can greatly serve both to satisfy the curious and to facilitate all the arts and lessen the labour of men; that writings dealing with morals contain many teachings and many exhortations to virtue that are very useful; that theology teaches how to gain heaven; that philosophy gives the means of speaking plausibly about all things and of making oneself admired by the less learned; that jurisprudence, medicine and the other sciences bring honours and riches to those who cultivate them; and finally that it is good to have examined them all, even the most superstitious and the most false, in order to know their just value and to guard against being deceived by them.

But I believed that I had already given enough time to languages, and also to the reading of the books of the ancients, both their histories and their fables. For conversing with those of other centuries is almost the same as travelling. It is good to know something of the customs of various peoples, in order to judge our own more soundly, and so that we do not think that everything contrary to our ways is ridiculous and against reason, as those who have seen nothing are accustomed to do. But when one spends too much time travelling, one ends by becoming a stranger in one's own country; and when one is too curious about the things that were done in past centuries, one usually remains very ignorant of those that are done in this one. Besides, fables make us imagine many events as possible that are not; and even the most faithful histories, if they neither alter nor exaggerate the importance of things in order to make them more worth reading, at least almost always omit the lowest and least illustrious circumstances; whence it comes that the rest does not appear as it is, and that those who regulate their conduct by the examples they draw from them are liable to fall into the extravagances of the knights-errant of our romances, and to conceive designs beyond their powers.

I esteemed eloquence highly, and I was in love with poetry; but I thought that both were gifts of the mind rather than fruits of study. Those who have the strongest reasoning, and who best digest their thoughts so as to make them clear and intelligible, can always best persuade others of what they propose, even if they spoke only Low Breton and had never learned rhetoric. And those who have the most pleasing inventions, and who know how to express them with the most ornament and sweetness, would not fail to be the best poets, even if the art of poetry were unknown to them.

I delighted above all in mathematics, because of the certainty and evidence of its reasonings; but I did not yet notice its true use, and, thinking that it served only the mechanical arts, I was astonished that, its foundations being so firm and solid, nothing more exalted had been built upon them. On the other hand, I compared the writings of the ancient pagans that deal with morals to very proud and magnificent palaces built only on sand and mud. They exalt the virtues very highly and make them appear estimable above all things in the world; but they do not sufficiently teach how to recognize them, and often what they call by so fine a name is only insensibility, or pride, or despair, or parricide.

I revered our theology, and aspired as much as anyone else to gain heaven; but having learned as a very certain thing that the way to it is no less open to the most ignorant than to the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead there are above our understanding, I would not have dared to submit them to the weakness of my reasonings; and I thought that, to undertake to examine them and to succeed, one would need some extraordinary assistance from heaven and to be more than a man.

I shall say nothing of philosophy except that, seeing that it has been cultivated by the most excellent minds that have lived for many centuries and that nevertheless there is still nothing in it which is not disputed and consequently which is not doubtful, I did not have enough presumption to hope to fare better in it than others; and that, considering how many different opinions there can be on one and the same matter, upheld by learned men, while there can never be more than one that is true, I held as almost false everything that was merely probable.

Then, as for the other sciences, inasmuch as they borrow their principles from philosophy, I judged that nothing solid could have been built on such unsteady foundations. And neither the honour nor the gain they promise was enough to induce me to learn them; for I did not feel myself, thank God, in a condition that obliged me to make a trade of learning for the relief of my fortune; and although I did not make a profession of despising glory like a Cynic, I nevertheless set very little store by that which I could hope to acquire only under false titles. And finally, as for the bad doctrines, I thought I already knew well enough what they were worth not to be liable any longer to be deceived either by the promises of an alchemist, or by the predictions of an astrologer, or by the impostures of a magician, or by the tricks or boasting of any of those who profess to know more than they do.

That is why, as soon as my age allowed me to leave the authority of my teachers, I entirely abandoned the study of letters. And resolving to seek no other knowledge than what could be found in myself, or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth travelling, seeing courts and armies, frequenting people of diverse humours and conditions, gathering diverse experiences, testing myself in the encounters that fortune offered me, and everywhere reflecting on the things that presented themselves so that I might draw some profit from them. For it seemed to me that I could find much more truth in the reasonings each man makes about the affairs that matter to him, and whose outcome must soon punish him if he has judged badly, than in those made by a man of letters in his study about speculations that produce no effect and are of no other consequence to him, except perhaps that he will draw all the more vanity from them the further they are from common sense, because he will have had to use all the more wit and artifice in trying to make them plausible. And I always had an extreme desire to learn to distinguish the true from the false, in order to see clearly in my actions and to walk with assurance in this life.

It is true that while I did nothing but consider the customs of other men, I found hardly anything there to make me certain, and I noticed in them almost as much diversity as I had previously noticed among the opinions of the philosophers. So that the greatest profit I drew from it was that, seeing many things which, although they seem very extravagant and ridiculous to us, are nonetheless commonly received and approved by other great peoples, I learned not to believe too firmly anything of which I had been persuaded only by example and custom; and thus I little by little freed myself from many errors that can obscure our natural light and make us less able to listen to reason. But after I had spent some years studying thus in the book of the world and trying to acquire some experience, I resolved one day to study within myself as well, and to use all the powers of my mind in choosing the paths I ought to follow. In this I succeeded much better, it seems to me, than if I had never left either my country or my books.