philosophers; so that the greatest profit I derived from it was that, seeing many things which, although they seem very extravagant and ridiculous to us, do not cease to be commonly received and approved by other great nations, I learned to believe nothing too firmly that had been persuaded to me only by example and by custom; and thus I gradually freed myself from many errors that can cloud our natural light original: "lumière naturelle." This refers to the innate human capacity for reason, which Descartes believed was a gift from God that allows us to discern truth from falsehood. and render us less capable of listening to reason. But, after I had spent several years studying thus in the book of the world A popular 17th-century metaphor for gaining knowledge through direct experience and travel rather than through academic texts. and trying to acquire some experience, I one day took the resolution to study also within myself, and to employ all the forces of my mind to choose the paths I ought to follow; which succeeded much better for me, it seems, than if I had never distanced myself from either my country or my books.

PART TWO

I was then in Germany, where the occasion of the wars which are not yet finished This refers to the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which was ongoing when Descartes published this work in 1637. had called me; and, as I was returning from the coronation of the Emperor Ferdinand II, crowned in Frankfurt in 1619. toward the army, the beginning of winter detained me in a quarter where, finding no conversation to divert me, and having, moreover, fortunately, no cares or passions to trouble me, I remained all day long shut up alone in a stove-heated room original: "poêle." In 17th-century Germany, this was a room kept warm by a large ceramic stove. It was here, in November 1619, that Descartes experienced the series of dreams and "intellectual flashes" that inspired his new method. where I had full leisure to converse with my own thoughts. Among these, one of the first was that I took it into my head to consider that often there is not so much perfection in works composed of several pieces and made by the hands of various masters as in those upon which only one person has worked. Thus one sees that buildings which a single architect has undertaken and finished are usually more beautiful and better ordered than those which several have tried to patch up by making use of old walls that had been built for other purposes. Thus these ancient cities which, having been at the beginning only small villages, have become, through the succession of time, great towns, are usually so poorly laid out, compared to those regular places Descartes is likely thinking of "ideal cities" or new military fortifications designed on a geometric grid, which were becoming popular in the Renaissance....