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--Somnio

Ergo

Sum

having neither conversation to divert me nor, fortunately, cares or passions to trouble me, I was completely free to consider my own thoughts. Among the first that occurred to me was the thought that there is not usually as much perfection in works comprised of many parts and produced by many different craftsmen as in the works of one man.

In this elation of isolated discovery, Descartes "remained the whole day [of Nov. 10] shut up alone in a heated chamber," painstakingly divesting himself of the burden of false knowledge and constructing "the foundation of the wonderful science." Just as the collaborative work of many craftsmen was by its very nature likely to be inferior, he decided,

The sciences found in books, at least those whose reasons were only probable and which had no proofs, have grown up little by little by the accumulation of the opinions of many different persons, and are therefore by no means as near to the truth as the simple and natural reasonings of a man of good sense, laboring under no prejudice concerning the things which he experiences.(4)

This buoyant if cerebral account in the Discourse, however -- which neglects the dreams of that night altogether -- is directly contradicted by that contained in the Olympica, Descartes's account written immediately after the Ulm experience. The Olympica was a section of the so-called "Little Notebook," a collection of Descartes's early occasional and incomplete writings lost in the late seventeenth century. A close paraphrase of the Olympica, however, was prepared by Descartes's first biographer, Adrien Baillet, in 1691, and it is from Baillet's documentation that we draw the most complete and contemporaneous record of Nov. 10, 1619. Descartes, Baillet writes in recreating the original account, was forced

to suffer as if it were a matter of stripping himself of himself. He believed that he had come to the end.... The search that he had wanted to make for these ways agitated his mind violently. These disturbances augmented more and more, as he found himself caught in a continual contention in which he could find diversion neither in walking nor in human society. This so exhausted him that his brain took fire, and he fell into a sort of enthusiasm, which so affected his mind, already over-tired, that it left him in the condition to receive the impressions of dreams and visions.(5)

Baillet here uses enthusiasm in its now-archaic sense, from the Greek entheos: possession by "the Demon," a state of supernatural frenzy. Stephen Gaukroger makes a compelling case that "Descartes was suffering a nervous breakdown, almost certainly not his first" -- that "the events of the days surrounding 10 November probably constituted a mental collapse of some kind, and that the thoughts on method that Descartes had been pursuing at the time came to symbolize his recovery."(6)