When he [Malevranche] happened to find Descartes' book entitled Man in a book shop on the rue Saint Jaques, he leafed through it, bought it and "read it with so much pleasure that he was forced at times to interrupt his reading, so loud were the beatings of his heart due to the extreme pleasure he had in doing so". Those who never put down a book of erudition, science or philosophy, to catch their breath, so to speak, and recover from the strong emotion they experience, certainly ignore of of the most exquisite pleasures of intellectual life.
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About tienne Gilson
tienne Gilson was a 19th-century French historian and philosopher. Étienne Henri Gilson was a Catholic, French philosopher and historian of philosophy. A scholar of medieval philosophy, he originally specialised in the thought of Descartes; he also philosophized in the "existential" tradition of Thomas Aquinas, although he did not consider himself a neo-Thomist philosopher. Read more on Wikipedia →