Philosophy help please! I am havign a realy hard time!?

I won't write five pages but I can give you some good links to get it done...

René Descartes’ major work on scientific method was the Discourse that was published in 1637 (more fully: Discourse on the Method for Rightly Directing One’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences). He published other works that deal with problems of method, but this remains central in any understanding of the Cartesian method of science. The common picture of Descartes is as one who proposed that all science become demonstrative in the way Euclid made geometry demonstrative, namely as a series of valid deductions from self-evident truths, rather than as something rooted in observation and experiment. Descartes is usually portrayed as one who defends and uses an a priori method to discover infallible knowledge, a method rooted in a doctrine of innate ideas that yields an intellectual knowledge of the essences of the things with which we are acquainted in our sensible experience of the world. This metaphysics of essences and the accompanying a priori method are then contrasted to the method of Newton, Bacon and the British empiricists, who denied the metaphysics of essences and the doctrine of innate ideas, and for whom knowledge of the world of sensible appearances was to be located, not by going outside it to a realm of essences, but by applying the method of experiment through which one could trace out the patterns in this world of causes and effects. There is something to this standard picture, but Descartes’ thought, like that of the empiricists, goes far beyond this simple description. In fact, Descartes sought to found our knowledge of things as much in experience and in experiment as in things a priori.

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