If there is something more in a living being than a pure mechanism, Descartes is bound in advance to miss it. - Étienne Gilson

I maintain, therefore, that just as there is in Cartesianism a methodical idealism, the kind that starts with nosse [knowing], there can be a methodical realism, the kind that starts with esse [being].

Reality can be grasped at levels of different depths. It is immediately given to us in a kind of block form, which is simply the "apprehended reality".

If there is a single initial error at the root of all the difficulties philosophy is involved in, it can only be the one Descartes committed when he decreed, a priori, that the method of one of the sciences of reality was valid for the whole of reality.