XI. Before the Door of the Spiritual Soul

With this as a premise, let us look at the philosopher René Descartes, whose work lay in the time when the Age of Consciousness was already well begun. (He lived from 1596 to 1650.) The one slender support on which he rests his connection with the spiritual world, is the inner realization: I think: therefore, I am. In the consciousness of Self, the central I, he tries to find Reality—and only so much of it as the Consciousness-Soul (the Spiritual Soul) can tell him. And on all the other problems of the spirit, he seeks to gain light by the intellectual method, by examining what guarantee the certainty of his own Self-consciousness affords of the certainty of other things. He enquires in every case, in respect of the truths historically transmitted to him: Are they as evident as this ‘ I think: therefore, I am.’ If he can affirm this, then he accepts them.