Descartes’s original title for Discourse on Method was “Project for a Science that Can Raise our Nature to its Highest Degree of Perfection.” And for a number of years he worked on a treatise in which he “resolved to explain all the phenomena of nature, that is all of physics” and to “make all my thoughts known so that they will convince some . . . and so that the others will not be able to contradict them.”

The notion that he could encompass all of physics in a single treatise is only part of his ambition. The original title of the Discourse also points to the ambition to transform human existence.