By a tacit avowal of the weakness of the human mind, the speculations of Descartes stopped short at death.  He had hopes, however, of retarding the moment of it.  “I felt myself alive,” he said, at forty years of age, “and, examining myself with as much care as if I were a rich old man, I fancied I was even farther from death than I had been in my youth.”  He had yielded to the entreaties of Queen Christina of Sweden, who had promised him an observatory, like that of Tycho Brahe.  He was delicate, and accustomed to follow a regimen adapted to his studies.  “O flesh!” he wrote to Gassendi, whose philosophy contradicted his own:  “O idea!” answered Gassendi.  The climate of Stockholm was severe; Descartes caught inflammation of the lungs; he insisted upon doctoring himself, and died on the 11th of February, 1650.  “He didn’t want to resist death,” said his friends, not admitting that their master’s will could be vanquished by death itself.  His influence remained for a long while supreme over his age.  Bossuet and Fenelon were Cartesians.  “I think, therefore I am,” wrote Madame de Sevigne to her daughter.  “I think of you tenderly, therefore I love you; I think only of you in that manner, therefore I love you only.”  Pascal alone, though adopting to a certain extent Descartes’ form of reasoning, foresaw the excess to which other minds less upright and less firm would push the system of the great philosopher.  “I cannot forgive Descartes,” he said; “he would have liked, throughout his philosophy, to be able to do without God, but he could not help making Him give just a flick to set the world in motion; after that he didn’t know what to do with God.”  A severe, but a true saying; Descartes had required everything of pure reason; he had felt a foreshadowing of the infinite and the unknown without daring to venture into them.  In the name of reason, others have denied the infinite and the unknown.  Pascal was wiser and bolder when, with St. Augustine, he found in reason itself a step towards faith.  “Reason would never give in if she were not of opinion that there are occasions when she ought to give in.”

By his philosophical method, powerful and logical, as well as by the clear, strong, and concise style he made use of to expound it, Descartes accomplished the transition from the sixteenth century to the seventeeth; he was the first of the great prose-writers of that incomparable epoch, which laid forever the foundations of the language.  At the same moment the great Corneille was rendering poetry the same service.

It had come out of the sixteenth century more disturbed and less formed than prose; Ronsard and his friends had received it from the hands of Marot, quite young, unsophisticated and undecided; they attempted, at the first effort, to raise it to the level of the great classic models of which their minds were full.  The attempt was bold, and the Pleiad did not pretend to consult the taste of the vulgar.  “The