have observed in either the operation or the contemplation of the method and order of nature. Although British Empiricists disavowed innate ideas, in favor of ideas from experience, it is important to note that the Empiricists did not reject the notion of instinct or innateness in general. Indeed, we have inborn propensities which regulate our bodily functions, produce emotions, and even direct our thinking. What Empiricists deny, though, is that we are born with detailed, picture-like, concepts of God, causality, and even mathematics. British Empiricists also moved away from deductive proofs and used an inductive method of arguing which was more conducive to the data of experience. In spite of their advocacy of inductive argumentation, though, British Empiricists still made wide use of deductive arguments. Rene Descartes, 1596-1650, measured for coffee. “Cogito ergo, sum.” His list of contributions includes, dualism, mechanism, and comparative anatomy. Born in La Haye, Touraine (a region and former province of France), Descartes was the son of a minor nobleman and belonged to a family that had produced a number of learned men. At the age of eight he was enrolled in the Jesuit school of La Flche in Anjou, where he remained for eight years. Besides the usual classical studies, Descartes received instruction in mathematics and in Scholastic philosophy, which attempted to use human reason to understand Christian doctrine. Descartes’ philosophy, called Cartesianism, carried him into elaborate and erroneous explanations of a number of physical phenomena. These explanations, however, had value, because he substituted a system of mechanical interpretations of physical phenomena for the vague spiritual concepts of most earlier writers. Although Descartes had at first been inclined to accept the Copernican theory of the universe with its concept of a system of spinning planets revolving around the sun, he abandoned this theory ...
