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Abstract

Descartes keeps a place of honour in the history of medicine as the discoverer of the conditioned and unconditioned reflex, as the founder of scientific psychology and the creator of basic methodological notions. His scholardy operation is potentialized by a deep social sense, practically certified by friendliness to people and by iniciativě interest in increasing universal well-being. Descartes's penetrating medical thinking is reflected in the entirely modern conception of cortico-visceral connection of some deceases and in the psycho-synthetic method of psychotherapy. The basis of this procedure is in introducing the correct self-realizing personality's direction of values, which leads then to respective constructive attitudes, so that even "the evil" afflicting the individual is used for gradating the powers of personality and so the most intensive pleasure of one’s own value is gained. The relatively nonsensical gains thus sense by manysided knowledge and by a wise exertion for the development of personality. Descartes’s basic device is the persuasion that it is better to enjoy less gaiety and on the contrary — more knowledge, spirit, human specific substance, i. e. the principle that is is broken e. g. by alcoholism. Jog is ust exchuded from, the system of values, but on the contrary it belongs into it. The highest value is, however, creative, creative acitvity, first of all creative activity of man’s specificity, of inventive spirit which aims principally at realization of what he recognized as appropriate. The worthy man is characterized by his sense of possibility, reality and inevitability, so that every unrealizable desire and a desire depreciating the level of the personality has no claim to reality. All these theoremes ensue from his basic conception of being formulated, with the final validity, in the letters to his confidential friend, princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, from the conception of substantial unity of the relatively independent "soul” and the relatively independent “body”. Even in this respect Descartes did justice to Marx’s and Engel’s characteristics: an exquisite representative of dialectics.