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Frans Hals painted me, probably in the late 1640s, shortly before I left for Sweden. Queen Christina had invited me to Stockholm to teach her philosophy at five o'clock in the morning. I was accustomed to spending my mornings in bed, thinking. I found the cold and the early hours debilitating and died of pneumonia in February 1650.

I had survived by keeping my ideas private until they were complete. When I heard that Galileo had been condemned, I suppressed my own cosmological work. I published the Meditations instead — a book that appears to be about the existence of God and ends up dismantling everything the reader believes about the nature of the mind. The Inquisition did not notice immediately. That was the idea.