René Descartes played his part in the world as a man in a mask. The phrase is his own. It implied no conscious duplicity but a certain apartness rendering him incapable of taking his share unreservedly in the game of life. His attitude was that of an unimpassioned spectator. He looked on and learned while others struggled for the stakes. A born recluse, he remained solitary even in the throng of social intercourse. ...The transport felt by Bacon at the glorious vision of a future in which the harvest he had sown would be reaped was not shared by Descartes. He indeed held himself to be the sower and the reaper in one. Calmly, and with settled conviction, he claimed to have virtually expounded all the phenomena of nature. He had crossed the frontier of the new world of knowledge; those who desired to follow him needed only to purge their eyes with the euphrasy of methodic doubt in order to obtain those crystal-clear intuitions from which, by sure reasoning, universal science could be deduced. ...He was a mathematician of first rate originality and power. ...Unfortunately, however, he was misled by false analogies of thought; he sought to universalise what was by its nature special and restricted; and thus pursued the flitting vision of a deceptive unity in knowledge. As the upshot, he gave to his philosophy a pseudo-mathematical character, and sacrificed the solid achievement of much by aiming at the illusory certainty of everything.