- Late night. I looked out the back window and saw a jacketed man standing on top of our shed. He was not moving. I turned off the lights to avoid being seen but he disappeared. I went outside to investigate and discovered a key inserted into our side garage door, unlocked, and upon entering the garage woke up screaming. Later I dreamed I was a sniper and felt the distinct experience of it being wrong.
- René Descartes (Wikipedia)
René Descartes (/deɪˈkɑːrt/ or UK: /ˈdeɪkɑːrt/; French: [ʁəne dekaʁt]; Latinized: Renatus Cartesius; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was central to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age. Although he served a Protestant state and was later counted as a deist by critics, Descartes considered himself a devout Catholic.