These ideas did not
correlate with the Biblical notion of the creation of the universe
by God in seven days, so Descartes feared persecution by the
church. Descartes believed in a good and perfect God, and thought
of the world as divided into matter and spirit. The human mind was
spirit and could exist outside the human body. The human mind had
knowledge without sense experience, e.g. the truths of mathematics
and physics. Ideas and imagination were innate. His observation
that sensory appearances are often misleading, such as in dreams
or hallucinations, led him to the conclusion that he could only
conclude that: "I think, therefore I am." He rejected the doctrine
that things had a proper behavior according to their natures, e.g.
the nature of acorns is to develop into oak trees. As an example
of erroneous forming of conceptions of substance with our senses
alone, he pointed out that honeycomb has a certain taste, scent,
and texture, but if exposed to fire, it loses all these forms and
assumes others. He expressed that it was error to believe that
there are no bodies around us except those perceivable by our
senses. He was a strong proponent of the deductive method of
finding truths, e.g. arguing logically from a very few self-
evident principles, known by intuition, to determine the nature
of the universe.
Christian Huygens, a Dutch physicist, used the melting and the
boiling point of water as fixed points in a scale of measurements,
which first gave definiteness to thermometric tests.
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