... it. During the time Descartes was writing, the sciences were unified, and were closely connected to philosophy and theology. Cottingham comments that the prevailing view was that "knowledge was a profoundly difficult and complex business" and that the search for truth was "a laborious attempt to uncover occult powers and forces". Others felt that all the world's truths could somehow be solved by one individual thinking alone, and extreme sceptics who were sceptical about the possibility of find any truths at all[1]. Descartes himself can be said to fit in the second category, and indeed was contemptuous of the idea that knowledge could be gained from books, as shown in part two of his Discourse on Method: "I thought that the sciences found in books...do not approach so near to the truth as the simple reasoning which a man of common sense can quite naturally carry out respecting the things which come ...

See this essay or coursework document in full right now