"We can best learn how mental intuition is to be employed by comparing it with ordinary vision."
— Descartes, René (1596-1650)
Author
Place of Publication
Amsterdam
Publisher
P. and J. Blaeu
Date
w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701
Metaphor
"We can best learn how mental intuition is to be employed by comparing it with ordinary vision."
Metaphor in Context
We can best learn how mental intuition is to be employed by comparing it with ordinary vision. If one tries to look at many objects at one glance, one sees none of them distinctly. Likewise, if one is inclined to attend to many things at the same time in a single act of thought, one does so with a confused mind. Yet craftsmen who engage in delicate operations, and are used to fixing their eyes on a single point, acquire through practice the ability to make perfect distinctions between things, however minute and delicate. The same is true of those who never let their thinking be distracted by many different objects at the same time, but always devote their whole attention to the simplest and easiest of matters: they become
perspicacious.
(Rule 9, p. 33)
perspicacious.
(Rule 9, p. 33)
Categories
Provenance
Past Masters
Citation
Reading Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985).
See Opuscula posthuma, physica et mathematica (Amsterdam: P. and J. Blaeu, 1701).
Not published in Descartes' lifetime. Dutch translation in 1684; published in Latin in 1701.
See Opuscula posthuma, physica et mathematica (Amsterdam: P. and J. Blaeu, 1701).
Not published in Descartes' lifetime. Dutch translation in 1684; published in Latin in 1701.
Date of Entry
10/01/2003
Date of Review
01/26/2012
