And yet, though Rembrandt's " Nightwatch " is dated the very year after the publication of the Meditations, not a word in Descartes breathes of any work of art or historical learning.
A Hundred Meditations of the Love of God, in prose, was first printed from a MS. at Stonyhurst College in 1873.
The theological professors took the alarm at passages in the Meditations; an attempt to prove the existence of God savoured, as they thought, of atheism and heresy.
The Discourse of Method and the Meditations apply what the Rules for the Direction of the Mind had regarded in particular instances to our conceptions of the world as a whole.
In 1705 Cartesianism was still subject to prohibitions from the authorities; but in a project of new statutes, drawn up for the faculty of arts at Paris in 1720, the Method and Meditations of Descartes were placed beside the Organon and the Metaphysics of Aristotle as text-books for philosophical study.
