René Descartes- Concrete — Thumbnail History (historylink.org)
The town of Concrete in northern Skagit County is located on the Skagit River at the mouth of the Baker River. Nestled in the foothills of the Cascade Range, Concrete is known as the gateway to the North Cascades. A few homesteaders began settling the area in the 1870s and 1880s, and more arrived over the next couple decades as two communities grew up, Baker on the west side of the Baker River and then Cement City on the east side…
- The majority of men is composed of two classes, for neither of which would this be at all a befitting resolution: in the first place, of those who with more than a due confidence in their own powers, are precipitate in their judgments and want the patience requisite for orderly and circumspect thinking; whence it happens, that if men of this class once take the liberty to doubt of their accustomed opinions, and quit the beaten highway, they will never be able to thread the byeway that would lead them by a shorter course, and will lose themselves and continue to wander for life; in the second place, of those who, possessed of sufficient sense or modesty to determine that there are others who excel them in the power of discriminating between truth and error, and by whom they may be instructed, ought rather to content themselves with the opinions of such than trust for more correct to their own Reason.