more perfectly know, in proportion to the absence of hinderances to the manifestation of the acts of his faculties; and that the most perfect knowledge will be realized through the least impeded action of the powers of knowledge.
The perfect exercise of our faculties of knowledge is only secured by the observance of certain conditions which may appear in the form of precepts.
The Cartesian Method is but a sum of precepts which teach how to secure the highest or most perfect, that is, at once the free and full action of the faculties of knowledge. The end of each of the Cartesian precepts is the free, or the full, action of these faculties.
Descartes teaches how to reach this end in the following injunctions:—
1. In his counselling a preliminary Doubt; for by this the mind throws off the influence of authority which leads us to think a thing in accordance with what others have thought, and thus to judge of a thing not from an actual inspection of it, but from the view of it taken by others. Authority thus interposes a barrier between thought and its matter. The power of thought, indeed, in being completely subject to authority, is altogether repressed in its action: the mind is wholly passive. It was thus that Descartes, to secure the free outgoing of the faculties of knowledge in the search after truth, counselled a general doubt.
2. Descartes seeks to allow to the faculties of knowledge perfect action in his precept to shun
