Poor Descartes

I give him such a verbal and written lashing, so it’s nice to find these words from Descartes which inspire me!

It might seem strange that opinions of weight are found in the works of poets rather than philosophers. The reason is that poets wrote through enthusiasm and imagination; there are in us seeds of knowledge, as of fire in a flint; philosophers extract them by way of reason, but poets strike them out of imagination, and then they shine more bright. 

—Descartes (in Applebaum 1995).