  The second fact that ought to give us pause is that Du Châtelet was remarkably even handed and open minded about her reaction to various thinkers. She seems to have been swayed neither by national prejudice nor by the authority of whatever great men were most favored in France in her time. She prescribed being guided by truth in one's philosophical decisions about what to adopt and what to reject from the various metaphysicians and physicists whose work was animating intellectual circles in her time (IP Avant-Propos VII, X and XI). She herself was remarkably in line with this principled approach. So while it is true that, in the main, she rejects Cartesian natural philosophy, she is still appreciative of Descartes' advances in, for example, geometry, dioptrics and method (IP Avant-Propos V, p.  118).[2]