ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters I examined literary and metaphorical utopian thought in the early modern period in Europe. Thomas More and Tommasso Campanella were critical of conditions in their own societies via the device of a narrative describing an imagined, far-away elsewhere. No explicit link was made to change in the writer’s own society, and the fictional world described was not intended as a plan, being merely a traveller’s tale. In a related but not identical way, Descartes intends to share a personal reflection but has no design for a new society. Writing in an introspective space established by Montaigne in the 1580s, Descartes seeks certainty because he doubts, but finds that the only factor of which he can be certain is the mental life of a doubting subject, from which he moves to the certainty of selfcontained numerical and geometric systems.
