Abstract

Writers on Descartes are apt to mention one dramatic event of his life—a dream he had in November 1619 in which the “Spirit of Truth” opened up for him “the treasures of all the sciences.” We know of the dream not from the published Descartes, though he perhaps alluded to it in the passage of the Discourse where he speaks of having spent a day alone “in a stove”; no, our textual source is his early biographer Adrien Baillet, writing seventy years after the event. Why do commentators fasten on that episode? I take it they find the paradox alluring—a stern rationalist set on his life-course by an oneiric revelation.