ABSTRACT
The work of Descartes had an enormous influence throughout all Europe during the latter half of the seventeenth century, largely because he was not only a great mathematician and anatomist, but also a powerful philosophical genius, who treated afresh, and with a remarkably catholic reach, all the big problems of the age by hitching them up in one fashion or another to the chariot of victorious mathematical science. In England especially, he aroused widespread interest mixed with considerable keen criticism. Among the thinkers flourishing there in the third quarter of the century who were sympathetic with the big task that Descartes was trying to accomplish though severely critical of him in certain important details, were Thomas Hobbes and Henry More. The work of the former has been already briefly referred to; we shall now describe his significance in the mathematical current of the times by locating it in a somewhat wider context as indicated by the above title.
