Discourse on the Method and Metaphysical Meditations

Xregular than those an engineer draws by his fancy on a plain, even though, considering their buildings individually, one often finds as much or more art in them as in those of others; however, seeing how they are arranged—here a large one, there a small one—and how they make the streets curved and uneven, one would say that it is chance rather than the will of some men using reason that has so disposed them. And if one considers that there have nevertheless always been some officials Descartes refers to urban planners or magistrates responsible for building codes. charged with looking after the buildings of private individuals to make them serve public decoration, one will well recognize that it is difficult, by working only on the works of others, to make things very perfect. Thus I imagined that those peoples who, having once been half-savage and having become civilized only little by little, have made their laws only as the inconvenience of crimes and quarrels constrained them, could not be as well governed as those who, from the moment they first assembled, observed the constitutions of some prudent legislator A reference to the classical ideal of a Lawgiver, like Solon of Athens or Lycurgus of Sparta.; just as it is quite certain that the state of the true religion, of which God alone made the ordinances, must be incomparably better regulated than all others. And, to speak of human things, I believe that if Sparta was formerly very flourishing, it was not because of the goodness of each of its laws in particular—seeing that many were very strange and even contrary to good morals—but because, having been invented by only one person, they all tended toward the same end. And so I thought that the sciences found in books—at least those whose reasons are only probable Descartes is critiquing the Scholastic philosophy of his time, which relied on tradition and "probable" arguments rather than certain, mathematical-style proofs. and which have no demonstrations—having been composed and enlarged little by little from the opinions of many different people, are not as close to the truth as the simple reasonings that a man of good sense can naturally make regarding the things that present themselves. And thus again I thought that, because we were all children before being men, and it was necessary for us to be governed for a long time by our appetites and our tutors (who were often contrary to one another, and neither of whom perhaps always advised us for the best), it is almost impossible that our judgments should be as pure or as solid as they would have been if we had had the full use of our reason from the moment of our birth, and had never been guided by anything else.

||| 5It is true that we do not see people throwing down all the houses of a city for the sole purpose of rebuilding them in another way and making the streets more beautiful;