In Meditations IV, Descartes claims that the greatest and chief perfection of man consists in the avoidance of error. In part six of his Discourse on Method, he presents a picture in which the advance of knowledge will render human beings the masters and possessors of nature. Dostoevsky presents a picture in which our drive for freedom is more fundamental than our drive for knowledge. His narrator claims: Reason is a fine thing, theres no question about it, but reason is only reason and only satisfies mans rational faculties, whereas desire is a manifestation of the whole of life, that is of the wholw of human life, along with reason and all of our head scratching