Philosophy

6 pages essay from just uploaded files due tuesday

INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY

Writing Assignment Guidelines

Format: I will only accept hardcopies.

Hard Deadline: August 2, 2018

This is not a research assignment. All the material for the successful completion of the assignment has

been covered in class. There are also notes available on the material available on Moodle.

Please do not plagiarize.

Topic: Explain in detail Descartes argument in the first Three Meditations. You paper should explain

Descartes goal in the Meditations, the dream argument, the demon hypothesis, the self as certain

foundation, the causal proof for the existence of God and so forth.

The assignment falls into four sections:

I. Introduction

What is Descartes primary goal in the Meditations?

What method does he utilize to achieve his goal? How specifically does the method work?

II. Doubt

What is the dream argument?

What is Descartes’ purpose in presenting it?

Why is the dream argument not enough? What is the demon hypothesis?

III. Certainty

Why does Descartes believe that he cannot be mistaken about everything?

What is the certain foundation?

To what does ‘I’ refer?

What is the essential property of the ‘I’?

What does it mean to say that ‘I exist’ is both clear and distinct?

What is the ‘wax example’ and what point is Descartes attempting to do with that argument?

IV. God

How does Descartes go about showing that something exists that is external to him and greater

than him?

What is the idea of God?

What are the main elements of the causal proof?

What are the ramifications of the proof for the demon hypothesis, and the status of

mathematical truth?

Meditations on First Philosophy
in which are demonstrated the existence of God and the distinction between

the human soul and body

René Descartes

0–201

[Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as
though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations,
are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates
the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth.—In his title for this work,
Descartes is following a tradition (started by Aristotle) which uses ‘first philosophy’ as a label for metaphysics.

First launched: July 200

Last amended: April 200

Contents

First Meditation

Second Meditation

Third Meditation 9

Fourth Meditation 17

Fifth Meditation 23

Sixth Meditation 27

Meditations René Descartes First Meditation

First Meditation:
On what can be called into doubt

Some years ago I was struck by how many false things I
had believed, and by how doubtful was the structure of
beliefs that I had based on them. I realized that if I wanted
to establish anything in the sciences that was stable and
likely to last, I needed—just once in my life—to demolish
everything completely and start again from the foundations.
It looked like an enormous task, and I decided to wait until
I was old enough to be sure that there was nothing to be
gained from putting it off any longer. I have now delayed
it for so long that I have no excuse for going on planning
to do it rather than getting to work. So today I have set all
my worries aside and arranged for myself a clear stretch of
free time. I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote
myself, sincerely and without holding back, to demolishing
my opinions.

I can do this without showing that all my beliefs are false,
which is probably more than I could ever manage. My reason
tells me that as well as withholding assent from propositions
that are obviously •false, I should also withhold it from ones
that are •not completely certain and indubitable. So all I
need, for the purpose of rejecting all my opinions, is to find
in each of them at least some reason for doubt. I can do
this without going through them one by one, which would
take forever: once the foundations of a building have been
undermined, the rest collapses of its own accord; so I will
go straight for the basic principles on which all my former
beliefs rested.

Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has
come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have
found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust

completely those who have deceived us even once.
[The next paragraph presents a series of considerations back and

forth. It is set out here as a discussion between two people, but that isn’t

how Descartes presented it.]
Hopeful: Yet although the senses sometimes deceive us

about objects that are very small or distant, that doesn’t
apply to my belief that I am here, sitting by the fire, wearing
a winter dressing-gown, holding this piece of paper in my
hands, and so on. It seems to be quite impossible to doubt
beliefs like these, which come from the senses. Another
example: how can I doubt that these hands or this whole
body are mine? To doubt such things I would have to liken
myself to brain-damaged madmen who are convinced they
are kings when really they are paupers, or say they are
dressed in purple when they are naked, or that they are
pumpkins, or made of glass. Such people are insane, and I
would be thought equally mad if I modelled myself on them.

Doubtful (sarcastically): What a brilliant piece of reason-
ing! As if I were not a man who sleeps at night and often has
all the same experiences while asleep as madmen do when
awake—indeed sometimes even more improbable ones. Often
in my dreams I am convinced of just such familiar events—
that I am sitting by the fire in my dressing-gown—when in
fact I am lying undressed in bed!

Hopeful: Yet right now my eyes are certainly wide open
when I look at this piece of paper; I shake my head and it
isn’t asleep; when I rub one hand against the other, I do it
deliberately and know what I am doing. This wouldn’t all
happen with such clarity to someone asleep.

Meditations René Descartes First Meditation

Doubtful: Indeed! As if I didn’t remember other occasions
when I have been tricked by exactly similar thoughts while
asleep! As I think about this more carefully, I realize that
there is never any reliable way of distinguishing being awake
from being asleep. This discovery makes me feel dizzy, [joke:]
which itself reinforces the notion that I may be asleep!

Suppose then that I am dreaming—it isn’t true that I,
with my eyes open, am moving my head and stretching out
my hands. Suppose, indeed that I don’t even have hands or
any body at all. Still, it has to be admitted that the visions
that come in sleep are like paintings: they must have been
made as copies of real things; so at least these general kinds
of things— eyes, head, hands and the body as a whole—must
be real and not imaginary. For even when painters try to
depict sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies,
they simply jumble up the limbs of different kinds of real
animals, rather than inventing natures that are entirely
new. If they do succeed in thinking up something completely
fictitious and unreal—not remotely like anything ever seen
before—at least the colours used in the picture must be real.
Similarly, although these general kinds of things— eyes,
head, hands and so on—could be imaginary, there is no
denying that certain even simpler and more universal kinds
of things are real. These are the elements out of which we
make all our mental images of things—the true and also the
false ones.

These simpler and more universal kinds include body,
and extension; the shape of extended things; their quantity,
size and number; the places things can be in, the time
through which they can last, and so on.

So it seems reasonable to conclude that physics, astron-
omy, medicine, and all other sciences dealing with things
that have complex structures are doubtful; while arithmetic,
geometry and other studies of the simplest and most general

things—whether they really exist in nature or not—contain
something certain and indubitable. For whether I am awake
or asleep, two plus three makes five, and a square has only
four sides. It seems impossible to suspect that such obvious
truths might be false.

However, I have for many years been sure that there is
an all-powerful God who made me to be the sort of creature
that I am. How do I know that he hasn’t brought it about
that there is no earth, no sky, nothing that takes up space,
no shape, no size, no place, while making sure that all these
things appear to me to exist? Anyway, I sometimes think
that others go wrong even when they think they have the
most perfect knowledge; so how do I know that I myself don’t
go wrong every time I add two and three or count the sides
of a square? Well, ·you might say·, God would not let me
be deceived like that, because he is said to be supremely
good. But, ·I reply·, if God’s goodness would stop him from
letting me be deceived •all the time, you would expect it to
stop him from allowing me to be deceived even •occasionally;
yet clearly I sometimes am deceived.

Some people would deny the existence of such a powerful
God rather than believe that everything else is uncertain.
Let us grant them—for purposes of argument—that there
is no God, and theology is fiction. On their view, then, I
am a product of fate or chance or a long chain of causes
and effects. But the less powerful they make my original
cause, the more likely it is that I am so imperfect as to be
deceived all the time—because deception and error seem to
be imperfections. Having no answer to these arguments, I
am driven back to the position that doubts can properly be
raised about any of my former beliefs. I don’t reach this
conclusion in a flippant or casual manner, but on the basis
of powerful and well thought-out reasons. So in future, if I
want to discover any certainty, I must withhold my assent

Meditations René Descartes Second Meditation

from these former beliefs just as carefully as I withhold it
from obvious falsehoods.

It isn’t enough merely to have noticed this, though; I must
make an effort to remember it. My old familiar opinions
keep coming back, and against my will they capture my
belief. It is as though they had a right to a place in my
belief-system as a result of long occupation and the law of
custom. These habitual opinions of mine are indeed highly
probable; although they are in a sense doubtful, as I have
shown, it is more reasonable to believe than to deny them.
But if I go on viewing them in that light I shall never get out
of the habit of confidently assenting to them. To conquer
that habit, therefore, I had better switch right around and
pretend (for a while) that these former opinions of mine are
utterly false and imaginary. I shall do this until I have
something to counter-balance the weight of old opinion,
and the distorting influence of habit no longer prevents me
from judging correctly. However far I go in my distrustful
attitude, no actual harm will come of it, because my project
won’t affect how I •act, but only how I •go about acquiring
knowledge.

So I shall suppose that some malicious, powerful, cun-

ning demon has done all he can to deceive me—rather than
this being done by God, who is supremely good and the
source of truth. I shall think that the sky, the air, the
earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are
merely dreams that the demon has contrived as traps for my
judgment. I shall consider myself as having no hands or eyes,
or flesh, or blood or senses, but as having falsely believed
that I had all these things. I shall stubbornly persist in this
train of thought; and even if I can’t learn any truth, I shall at
least do what I can do, which is to be on my guard against
accepting any falsehoods, so that the deceiver—however
powerful and cunning he may be—will be unable to affect me
in the slightest. This will be hard work, though, and a kind
of laziness pulls me back into my old ways. Like a prisoner
who dreams that he is free, starts to suspect that it is merely
a dream, and wants to go on dreaming rather than waking
up, so I am content to slide back into my old opinions; I
fear being shaken out of them because I am afraid that my
peaceful sleep may be followed by hard labour when I wake,
and that I shall have to struggle not in the light but in the
imprisoning darkness of the problems I have raised.

Second Meditation:
The nature of the human mind, and how it is better known than the body

Yesterday’s meditation raised doubts—ones that are too
serious to be ignored—which I can see no way of resolving.
I feel like someone who is suddenly dropped into a deep

whirlpool that tumbles him around so that he can neither
stand on the bottom nor swim to the top. However, I shall
force my way up, and try once more to carry out the project

Meditations René Descartes Second Meditation

that I started on yesterday. I will set aside anything that
admits of the slightest doubt, treating it as though I had
found it to be outright false; and I will carry on like that until
I find something certain, or—at worst—until I become certain
that there is no certainty. Archimedes said that if he had
one firm and immovable point he could lift the world ·with
a long enough lever·; so I too can hope for great things if I
manage to find just one little thing that is solid and certain.

I will suppose, then, that everything I see is fictitious. I
will believe that my memory tells me nothing but lies. I have
no senses. Body, shape, extension, movement and place are
illusions. So what remains true? Perhaps just the one fact
that nothing is certain!

[This paragraph is presented as a further to-and-fro argument be-
tween two people. Remember that this isn’t how Descartes wrote it.]

Hopeful: Still, how do I know that there isn’t something—
not on that list—about which there is no room for even the
slightest doubt? Isn’t there a God (call him what you will)
who gives me the thoughts I am now having?

Doubtful: But why do I think this, since I might myself
be the author of these thoughts?

Hopeful: But then doesn’t it follow that I am, at least,
something?

Doubtful: This is very confusing, because I have just said
that I have no senses and no body, and I am so bound up
with a body and with senses that one would think that I can’t
exist without them. Now that I have convinced myself that
there is nothing in the world—no sky, no earth, no minds,
no bodies—does it follow that I don’t exist either?

Hopeful: No it does not follow; for if I convinced myself
of something then I certainly existed.

Doubtful: But there is a supremely powerful and cunning
deceiver who deliberately deceives me all the time!

Hopeful: Even then, if he is deceiving me I undoubtedly

exist: let him deceive me all he can, he will never bring it
about that I am nothing while I think I am something. So
after thoroughly thinking the matter through I conclude that
this proposition, I am, I exist, must be true whenever I assert
it or think it.

But this ‘I’ that must exist—I still don’t properly under-
stand what it is; so I am at risk of confusing it with something
else, thereby falling into error in the very item of knowledge
that I maintain is the most certain and obvious of all. To get
straight about what this ‘I’ is, I shall go back and think some
more about what I believed myself to be before I started this
meditation. I will eliminate from those beliefs anything that
could be even slightly called into question by the arguments I
have been using, which will leave me with only beliefs about
myself that are certain and unshakable.

Well, then, what did I think I was? A man. But what is a
man? Shall I say ‘a rational animal’? No; for then I should
have to ask what an animal is, and what rationality is—each
question would lead me on to other still harder ones, and this
would take more time than I can spare. Let me focus instead
on the beliefs that spontaneously and naturally came to me
whenever I thought about what I was. The first such belief
was that I had a face, hands, arms and the whole structure
of bodily parts that corpses also have—I call it the body. The
next belief was that I ate and drank, that I moved about,
and that I engaged in sense-perception and thinking; these
things, I thought, were done by the soul. [In this work ‘the soul’
= ‘the mind’; it has no religious implications.] If I gave any thought
to what this soul was like, I imagined it to be something
thin and filmy— like a wind or fire or ether—permeating my
more solid parts. I was more sure about the body, though,
thinking that I knew exactly what sort of thing it was. If
I had tried to put my conception of the body into words, I
would have said this:

Meditations René Descartes Second Meditation

By a ‘body’ I understand whatever has a definite shape
and position, and can occupy a ·region of· space in
such a way as to keep every other body out of it; it can
be perceived by touch, sight, hearing, taste or smell,
and can be moved in various ways.

I would have added that a body can’t start up movements
by itself, and can move only through being moved by other
things that bump into it. It seemed to me quite out of
character for a body to be able to •initiate movements, or
to able to •sense and think, and I was amazed that certain
bodies—·namely, human ones·—could do those things.

But now that I am supposing there is a supremely pow-
erful and malicious deceiver who has set out to trick me in
every way he can—now what shall I say that I am? Can I
now claim to have any of the features that I used to think
belong to a body? When I think about them really carefully,
I find that they are all open to doubt: I shan’t waste time
by showing this about each of them separately. Now, what
about the features that I attributed to the soul? Nutrition or
movement? Since now ·I am pretending that· I don’t have a
body, these are mere fictions. Sense-perception? One needs
a body in order to perceive; and, besides, when dreaming I
have seemed to perceive through the senses many things that
I later realized I had not perceived in that way. Thinking? At
last I have discovered it—thought! This is the one thing that
can’t be separated from me. I am, I exist—that is certain.
But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. But perhaps
no longer than that; for it might be that if I stopped thinking
I would stop existing; and ·I have to treat that possibility as
though it were actual, because· my present policy is to reject
everything that isn’t necessarily true. Strictly speaking, then,
I am simply a thing that thinks—a mind, or soul, or intellect,
or reason, these being words whose meaning I have only just
come to know. Still, I am a real, existing thing. What kind of

a thing? I have answered that: a thinking thing.
What else am I? I will use my imagination to see if I am

anything more. I am not that structure of limbs and organs
that is called a human body; nor am I a thin vapour that
permeates the limbs—a wind, fire, air, breath, or whatever I
imagine; for I have supposed all these things to be nothing
·because I have supposed all bodies to be nothing·. Even if
I go on supposing them to be nothing, I am still something.
But these things that I suppose to be nothing because they
are unknown to me—might they not in fact be identical with
the I of which I am aware? I don’t know; and just now I
shan’t discuss the matter, because I can form opinions only
about things that I know. I know that I exist, and I am
asking: what is this I that I know? My knowledge of it can’t
depend on things of whose existence I am still unaware; so
it can’t depend on anything that I invent in my imagination.
The word ‘invent’ points to what is wrong with relying on
my imagination in this matter: if I used imagination to show
that I was something or other, that would be mere invention,
mere story-telling; for imagining is simply contemplating
the shape or image of a bodily thing. [Descartes here relies
on a theory of his about the psychology of imagination.] That makes
imagination suspect, for while I know for sure that I exist, I
know that everything relating to the nature of body ·including
imagination· could be mere dreams; so it would be silly
for me to say ‘I will use my imagination to get a clearer
understanding of what I am’—as silly, indeed, as to say ‘I
am now awake, and see some truth; but I shall deliberately
fall asleep so as to see even more, and more truly, in my
dreams’! If my mind is to get a clear understanding of its
own nature, it had better not look to the imagination for it.

Well, then, what am I? A thing that thinks. What is that?
A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wants,
refuses, and also imagines and senses.

Meditations René Descartes Second Meditation

That is a long list of attributes for me to have—and it
really is I who have them all. Why should it not be? Isn’t it
one and the same ‘I’ who now

doubts almost everything,
understands some things,
affirms this one thing—·namely, that I exist and think·,
denies everything else,
wants to know more,
refuses to be deceived,
imagines many things involuntarily, and
is aware of others that seem to come from the senses?

Isn’t all this just as true as the fact that I exist, even if I am
in a perpetual dream, and even if my creator is doing his best
to deceive me? Which of all these activities is distinct from
my thinking? Which of them can be said to be separate from
myself? The fact that it is I who doubt and understand and
want is so obvious that I can’t see how to make it any clearer.
But the ‘I’ who imagines is also this same ‘I’. For even if (as I
am pretending) none of the things that I imagine really exist,
I really do imagine them, and this is part of my thinking.
Lastly, it is also this same ‘I’ who senses, or is aware of
bodily things seemingly through the senses. Because I may
be dreaming, I can’t say for sure that I now see the flames,
hear the wood crackling, and feel the heat of the fire; but
I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This
cannot be false; what is called ‘sensing’ is strictly just this
seeming, and when ‘sensing’ is understood in this restricted
sense of the word it too is simply thinking.

All this is starting to give me a better understanding
of what I am. But I still can’t help thinking that bodies—
of which I form mental images and which the senses
investigate—are much more clearly known to me than is
this puzzling ‘I’ that can’t be pictured in the imagination.
It would be surprising if this were right, though; for it

would be surprising if I had a clearer grasp of things that I
realize are doubtful, unknown and foreign to me—·namely,
bodies·—than I have of what is true and known— namely
my own self. But I see what the trouble is: I keep drifting
towards that error because my mind likes to wander freely,
refusing to respect the boundaries that truth lays down. Very
well, then; I shall let it run free for a while, so that when
the time comes to rein it in it won’t be so resistant to being
pulled back.

Let us consider the things that people ordinarily think
they understand best of all, namely the bodies that we touch
and see. I don’t mean bodies in general—for our general
thoughts are apt to be confused—but one particular body:
this piece of wax, for example. It has just been taken from
the honeycomb; it still tastes of honey and has the scent of
the flowers from which the honey was gathered; its colour,
shape and size are plain to see; it is hard, cold and can be
handled easily; if you rap it with your knuckle it makes a
sound. In short, it has everything that seems to be needed
for a body to be known perfectly clearly. But as I speak these
words I hold the wax near to the fire, and look! The taste and
smell vanish, the colour changes, the shape is lost, the size
increases; the wax becomes liquid and hot; you can hardly
touch it, and it no longer makes a sound when you strike it.
But is it still the same wax? Of course it is; no-one denies
this. So what was it about the wax that I understood so
clearly? Evidently it was not any of the features that the
senses told me of; for all of them— brought to me through
taste, smell, sight, touch or hearing—have now altered, yet
it is still the same wax.

Perhaps what I now think about the wax indicates what
its nature was all along. If that is right, then the wax was
not the sweetness of the honey, the scent of the flowers, the
whiteness, the shape, or the sound, but was rather a body

Meditations René Descartes Second Meditation

that recently presented itself to me in those ways but now
appears differently. But what exactly is this thing that I
am now imagining? Well, if we take away whatever doesn’t
belong to the wax (·that is, everything that the wax could be
without·), what is left is merely something extended, flexible
and changeable. What do ‘flexible’ and ‘changeable’ mean
here? I can imaginatively picture this piece of wax changing
from round to square, from square to triangular, and so
on. But that isn’t what changeability is. In knowing that
the wax is changeable I understand that it can go through
endlessly many changes of that kind, far more than I can
depict in my imagination; so it isn’t my imagination that
gives me my grasp of the wax as flexible and changeable.
Also, what does ‘extended’ mean? Is the wax’s extension
also unknown? It increases if the wax melts, and increases
again if it boils; the wax can be extended in many more ways
(·that is, with many more shapes·) than I will ever bring
before my imagination. I am forced to conclude that the
nature of this piece of wax isn’t revealed by my imagination,
but is perceived by the mind alone. (I am speaking of •this
particular piece of wax; the point is even clearer with regard
to •wax in general.) This wax that is perceived by the mind
alone is, of course, the same wax that I see, touch, and
picture in my imagination—in short the same wax I thought
it to be from the start. But although my perception of it
seemed to be a case of vision and touch and imagination, it
isn’t so and it never was. Rather, it is purely a scrutiny by
the mind alone— formerly an imperfect and confused one,
but now vivid and clear because I am now concentrating
carefully on what the wax consists in.

As I reach this conclusion I am amazed at how prone to
error my mind is. For although I am thinking all this out
within myself, silently, I do it with the help of words, and
I am at risk of being led astray by them. When the wax is

in front of us, we say that we see it, not that we judge it to
be there from its colour or shape; and this might make me
think that knowledge of the wax comes from what the eye
sees rather than from the perception of the mind alone. But
·this is clearly wrong, as the following example shows·. If I
look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as
I have just done, I say that I see the men themselves, just
as I say that I see the wax; yet do I see any more than hats
and coats that could conceal robots? I judge that they are
men. Something that I thought I saw with my eyes, therefore,
was really grasped solely by my mind’s faculty of judgment
[= ‘ability or capacity to make judgments’].

However, someone who wants to know more than the
common crowd should be ashamed to base his doubts on
ordinary ways of talking. Let us push ahead, then, and
ask: When was my perception of the wax’s nature more
perfect and clear? Was it •when I first looked at the wax, and
thought I knew it through my senses? Or is it •now, after I
have enquired more carefully into the wax’s nature and into
how it is known? It would be absurd to hesitate in answering
the question; for what clarity and sharpness was there in
my earlier perception of the wax? Was there anything in it
that •a lower animal couldn’t have? But when I consider the
wax apart from its outward forms—take its clothes off, so to
speak, and consider it naked—then although my judgment
may still contain errors, at least I am now having a perception
of a sort that requires •a human mind.

But what am I to say about this mind, or about myself?
(So far, remember, I don’t admit that there is anything to me
except a mind.) What, I ask, is this ‘I’ that seems to perceive
the wax so clearly? Surely, I am aware of •my own self in a
truer and more certain way than I am of •the wax, and also
in a much more distinct and evident way. What leads me to
think that •the wax exists—namely, that I see it— leads much

Meditations René Descartes Second Meditation

more obviously to the conclusion that •I exist. What I see
might not really be the wax; perhaps I don’t even have eyes
with which to see anything. But when I see or think I see (I
am not here distinguishing the two), it is simply not possible
that I who am now thinking am not something. Similarly,
that •I exist follows from the other bases for judging that
•the wax exists – that I touch it, that I imagine it, or any
other basis—and similarly for my bases for judging that
anything else exists outside me. As I came to perceive the
wax more distinctly by applying not just sight and touch but
other considerations, all this too contributed to my knowing
myself even more distinctly, because whatever goes into my
perception of •the wax or of any other body must do even
more to establish the nature of •my own mind. What comes
to my mind from bodies, therefore, helps me to know my

mind distinctly; yet all of that pales into insignificance—it
is hardly worth mentioning—when compared with what
my mind contains within itself that enables me to know
it distinctly.

See! With no effort I have reached the place where I
wanted to be! I now know that even bodies are perceived not
by the senses or by imagination but by the intellect alone,
not through their being touched or seen but through their
being understood; and this helps me to know plainly that
I can perceive my own mind more easily and clearly than I
can anything else. Since the grip of old opinions is hard to
shake off, however, I want to pause and meditate for a while
on this new knowledge of mine, fixing it more deeply in my
memory.

Meditations on First Philosophy
in which are demonstrated the existence of God and the distinction between

the human soul and body

René Descartes

–20

First launched: July 2004 Last amended: April 2007

Contents

First Meditation 1

Second Meditation 3

Third Meditation

Fourth Meditation

Fifth Meditation 23

Sixth Meditation 27

Meditations René Descartes Third Meditation

Third Meditation:
God

[Before we move on, a translation matter should be confronted. It con-
cerns the Latin adjectives

clarus and distinctus
the corresponding French adjectives

clair and distinct
and the corresponding English adjectives

‘vivid’ and ‘clear’.
Every other translator of this work into English has put

‘clear’ and ‘distinct’

and for a while the present translator in cowardly fashion followed suit.

But the usual translation is simply wrong, and we ought to free ourselves

from it. The crucial point concerns clarus (and everything said about that

here is equally true of the French clair). The word can mean ‘clear’ in our

sense, and when Descartes uses it outside the clarus et distinctus phrase,
it seems usually to be in that sense. But in that phrase he uses clarus
in its other meaning—its more common meaning in Latin—of ‘bright’ or

‘vivid’ or the like, as in clara lux = ‘broad daylight’. If in the phrase clarus

et distinctus Descartes meant clarus in its lesser meaning of ‘clear’, then

what is there left for ‘distinctus’ to mean? Descartes doesn’t explain

these terms here, but in his Principles of Philosophy 1:45–6 he does

so—in a manner that completely condemns the usual translation. He

writes: ‘I call a perception claram when it is present and accessible to

the attentive mind—just as we say that we see something clare when

it is present to the eye’s gaze and stimulates it with a sufficient degree

of strength and accessibility. I call a perception distinctam if, as well

as being clara, it is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that

every part of it is clarum.. . . . The example of pain shows that a perception

can be clara without being distincta but not vice versa. When for example

someone feels an intense pain, his perception of it is clarissima, but it

isn’t always clear, because people often get this perception muddled with

an obscure judgment they make about something that they think exists

in the painful spot. . . .’ and so on. Of course he is not saying anything

as stupid as that intense pain is always clear! His point is that pain is

vivid, up-front, not shady or obscure. And for an idea to be distincta is

for every nook and cranny of it to be vivid; which is not a bad way of

saying that it is in our sense ‘clear’.]
I will now shut my eyes, block my ears, cut off all my

senses. I will regard all my mental images of bodily things
as empty, false and worthless (if I could, I would clear them
out of my mind altogether). I will get into conversation with
myself, examine myself more deeply, and try in this way
gradually to know myself more intimately. I am a thing
that thinks, i.e that doubts, affirms, denies, understands
some things, is ignorant of many others, wills, and refuses.
This thing also imagines and has sensory perceptions; for,
as I remarked before, even if the objects of my sensory
experience and imagination don’t exist outside me, still
sensory perception and imagination themselves, considered
simply as mental events, certainly do occur in me.

That lists everything that I truly know, or at least every-
thing I have, up to now, discovered that I know. Now I will
look more carefully to see whether I have overlooked other
facts about myself. I am certain that I am a thinking thing.
Doesn’t that tell me what it takes for me to be certain about
anything? In this first item of knowledge there is simply
a vivid and clear perception of what I am asserting; this
wouldn’t be enough to make me certain of its truth if it could
ever turn out that something that I perceived so vividly and
clearly was false. So I now seem to be able to lay it down as a
general rule that whatever I perceive very vividly and clearly
is true.

Meditations René Descartes Third Meditation

I previously accepted as perfectly certain and evident
many things that I afterwards realized were doubtful—the
earth, sky, stars, and everything else that I took in through
the senses—but in those cases what I perceived clearly were
merely the ideas or thoughts of those things that came into
my mind; and I am still not denying that those ideas occur
within me. But I used also to believe that my ideas came from
things outside that resembled them in all respects. Indeed, I
believed this for so long that I wrongly came to think that I
perceived it clearly. In fact, it was false; or anyway if it was
true it was not thanks to the strength of my perceptions.

But what about when I was considering something simple
and straightforward in arithmetic or geometry, for example
that two plus three makes five? Didn’t I see these things
clearly enough to accept them as true? Indeed, the only
reason I could find for doubting them was this: Perhaps
some God could have made me so as to be deceived even in
those matters that seemed most obvious. Whenever I bring
to mind my old belief in the supreme power of God, I have
to admit that God could, if he wanted to, easily make me go
wrong even about things that I think I see perfectly clearly.
But when I turn my thought onto the things themselves—the
ones I think I perceive clearly—I find them so convincing that
I spontaneously exclaim: ‘Let him do his best to deceive me!
He will never bring it about that I am nothing while I think I
am something; or make it true in the future that I have never
existed, given that I do now exist; or bring it about that two
plus three make more or less than five, or anything else like
this in which I see a plain contradiction.’ Also, since I have
no evidence that there is a deceiving God, and don’t even
know for sure that there is a God at all, the reason for doubt
that depends purely on this supposition of a deceiving God
is a very slight and theoretical one. However, I shall want to
remove even this slight reason for doubt; so when I get the

opportunity I shall examine whether there is a God, and (if
there is) whether he can be a deceiver. If I don’t settle this, it
seems, then I can never be quite certain about anything else.

First, if I am to proceed in an orderly way I should classify
my thoughts into definite kinds, and ask which kinds can
properly be said to be true or false. Some of my thoughts are,
so to speak, images or pictures of things—as when I think of
a man, or a chimera, or the sky, or an angel, or God— and
strictly speaking these are the only thoughts that should be
called ‘ideas’. Other thoughts have more to them than that:
for example when I will, or am afraid, or affirm, or deny, my
thought represents some particular thing but it also includes
something more than merely the likeness of that thing. Some
thoughts in this category are called volitions or emotions,
while others are called judgments.

When ideas are considered solely in themselves and not
taken to be connected to anything else, they can’t be false;
for whether it is •a goat that I am imagining or •a chimera,
either way it is true that I do imagine it. Nor is there falsity
in the will or the emotions; for even if the things I want are
wicked or non-existent, it is still true that I want them. All
that is left—the only kind of thought where I must watch out
for mistakes—are judgments. And the mistake they most
commonly involve is to judge that my ideas resemble things
outside me. Of course, if I considered the ideas themselves
simply as aspects of my thought and not as connected to
anything else, they could hardly lead me into any error.

Among my ideas, some seem to be •innate, some to be
•caused from the outside, and others to have been •invented
by me. As I see it, •my understanding of what a thing is,
what truth is, and what thought is, derives purely from my
own nature, ·which means that it is innate·; •my hearing a
noise or seeing the sun or feeling the fire comes from things
outside me; and •sirens, hippogriffs and the like are my own

Meditations René Descartes Third Meditation

invention. But perhaps really all my ideas are caused from
the outside, or all are innate, or all are made up; for I still
have not clearly perceived their true origin.

But my main question now concerns the ideas that I
take to come from things outside me: why do I think they
resemble these things? Nature has apparently taught me
to think that they do. But also I know from experience that
these ideas don’t depend on my will, and thus don’t depend
simply on me. They often come into my mind without my
willing them to: right now, for example, I have a feeling of
warmth, whether I want to or not, and that leads me to think
that this sensation or idea of heat comes from something
other than myself, namely the heat of a fire by which I am
sitting. And it seems natural to suppose that what comes to
me from that external thing will be like it rather than unlike
it.

Now let me see if these arguments are strong enough.
When I say ‘Nature taught me to think this’, all I mean is
that •I have a spontaneous impulse to believe it, not that
•I am shown its truth by some natural light. There is a
great difference between those. Things that are revealed by
the natural light—for example, that if I am doubting then I
exist—are not open to any doubt, because no other faculty
that might show them to be false could be as trustworthy
as the natural light. My natural impulses, however, have
no such privilege: I have often come to think that they had
pushed me the wrong way on moral questions, and I don’t
see any reason to trust them in other things.

Then again, although these ideas don’t depend on my will,
it doesn’t follow that they must come from things located
outside me. Perhaps they come from some faculty of mine
other than my will—one that I don’t fully know about—which
produces these ideas without help from external things;
this is, after all, just how I have always thought ideas are

produced in me when I am dreaming. Similarly, the natural
impulses that I have been talking about, though they seem
opposed to my will, come from within me; ·which provides
evidence that I can cause things that my will does not cause·.

Finally, even if these ideas do come from things other
than myself, it doesn’t follow that they must resemble those
things. Indeed, I think I have often discovered objects to be
very unlike my ideas of them. For example, I find within
me two different ideas of the sun: •one seems to come from
the senses—it is a prime example of an idea that I reckon to
have an external source—and it makes the sun appear very
small; •the other is based on astronomical reasoning—i.e.
it is based on notions that are innate in me (or else it is
constructed by me in some other way)—and it shows the
sun to be many times larger than the earth. Obviously these
ideas cannot both resemble the external sun; and reason
convinces me that the idea that seems to have come most
directly from the sun itself in fact does not resemble it at all.

These considerations show that it isn’t reliable judgment
but merely some blind impulse that has led me to think that
there exist outside me things that give ideas or images [=
‘likenesses’] of themselves through the sense organs or in some
other way.

Perhaps, though, there is another way of investigating
whether some of the things of which I have ideas really
do exist outside me. Considered simply as mental events,
my ideas seem to be all on a par: they all appear to come
from inside me in the same way. But considered as images
representing things other than themselves, it is clear that
they differ widely. Undoubtedly, the •ideas that represent
substances amount to something more—they contain within
themselves more representative reality—than do the •ideas
that merely represent modes [= ‘qualities’]. Again, the •idea
that gives me my understanding of a supreme God—eternal,

Meditations René Descartes Third Meditation

infinite, unchangeable, omniscient, omnipotent and the
creator of everything that exists except for himself—certainly
has in it more representative reality than the •ideas that
represent merely finite substances.

Now it is obvious by the natural light that the total cause
of something must contain at least as much reality as does
the effect. For where could the effect get its reality from if
not from the cause? And how could the cause give reality to
the effect unless it first had that reality itself? Two things
follow from this: that something can’t arise from nothing,
and that what is more perfect—that is, contains in itself
more reality—can’t arise from what is less perfect. And this
is plainly true not only for ‘actual’ or ‘intrinsic’ reality (as
philosophers call it) but also for the representative reality of
ideas—that is, the reality that a idea represents. A stone,
for example, can begin to exist only if it is produced by
something that contains—either straightforwardly or in some
higher form—everything that is to be found in the stone;
similarly, heat can’t be produced in a previously cold object
except by something of at least the same order of perfection
as heat, and so on. (·I don’t say simply ‘except by something
that is hot’, because that is not necessary. The thing
could be caused to be hot by something that doesn’t itself
straightforwardly contain heat—i.e. that isn’t itself hot— but
contains heat in a higher form, that is, something of a higher
order of perfection than heat. Thus, for example, although
God is obviously not himself hot, he can cause something to
be hot because he contains heat not straightforwardly but in
a higher form·.) But it is also true that the idea of heat or of
a stone can be caused in me only by something that contains
at least as much reality as I conceive to be in the heat or
in the stone. For although this cause does not transfer any
of its actual or intrinsic reality to my idea, it still can’t be
less real. An idea need have no intrinsic reality except what

it derives from my thought, of which it is a mode. But any
idea that has representative reality must surely come from
a cause that contains at least as much intrinsic reality as
there is representative reality in the idea. For if we suppose
that an idea contains something that was not in its cause, it
must have got this from nothing; yet the kind of reality that
is involved in something’s being represented in the mind by
an idea, though it may not be very perfect, certainly isn’t
nothing, and so it can’t come from nothing.

It might be thought that since the reality that I am
considering in my ideas is merely representative, it might
be possessed by its cause only representatively and not
intrinsically. ·That would mean that the cause is itself
an idea, because only ideas have representative reality·.
But that would be wrong. Although one idea may perhaps
originate from another, there can’t be an infinite regress
of such ideas; eventually one must come back to an idea
whose cause isn’t an idea, and this cause must be a kind
of archetype [= ‘pattern or model, from which copies are made’] con-
taining intrinsically all the reality or perfection that the idea
contains only representatively. So the natural light makes it
clear to me that my ideas are like pictures or images that can
easily •fall short of the perfection of the things from which
they are taken, but which can’t •exceed it.

The longer and more carefully I examine all these points,
the more vividly and clearly I recognize their truth. But what
is my conclusion to be? If I find that

•some idea of mine has so much representative reality
that I am sure the same reality doesn’t reside in me,
either straightforwardly or in a higher form, and hence
that I myself can’t be the cause of the idea,

then, ·because everything must have some cause·, it will
necessarily follow that

Meditations René Descartes Third Meditation

•I am not alone in the world: there exists some other
thing that is the cause of that idea.

If no such idea is to be found in me, I shall have no argument
to show that anything exists apart from myself; for, despite
a most careful and wide-ranging survey, this is the only
argument I have so far been able to find.

Among my ideas, apart from the one that gives me a
representation of myself, which can’t present any difficulty
in this context, there are ideas that variously represent God,
inanimate bodies, angels, animals and finally other men like
myself.

As regards my ideas of other men, or animals, or angels,
I can easily understand that they could be put together from
the ideas I have of myself, of bodies and of God, even if the
world contained no men besides me, no animals and no
angels.

As to my ideas of bodies, so far as I can see they contain
nothing that is so great or excellent that it couldn’t have
originated in myself. For if I examine them thoroughly, one
by one, as I did the idea of the wax yesterday, I realize that
the following short list gives everything that I perceive vividly
and clearly in them:

•size, or extension in length, breadth and depth;
•shape, which is a function of the boundaries of this
extension;

•position, which is a relation between various items
possessing shape;

• motion, or change in position.
To these may be added

•substance, duration and number.
But as for all the rest, including light and colours, sounds,
smells, tastes, heat and cold and the other qualities that can
be known by touch, I think of these in such a confused and

obscure way that I don’t even know whether they are true
or false, that is, whether my ideas of them are ideas of real
things or of non-things. Strictly speaking, only judgments
can be true or false; but we can also speak of an idea as
‘false’ in a certain sense—we call it ‘materially false’—if it
represents a non-thing as a thing. For example, my ideas of
heat and cold have so little clarity and distinctness that they
don’t enable me to know whether

•cold is merely the absence of heat, or
•heat is merely the absence of cold, or
•heat and cold are both real ·positive· qualities, or
•neither heat nor cold is a real ·positive· quality.

If the right answer is that cold is nothing but the absence of
heat, the idea that represents it to me as something real and
positive deserves to be called ‘false’; and the same goes for
other ideas of this kind.

Such ideas obviously don’t have to be caused by some-
thing other than myself. •If they are false—that is, if they
represent non-things—then they are in me only because of
a deficiency or lack of perfection in my nature, which is to
say that they arise from nothing; I know this by the natural
light. •If on the other hand they are true, there is no reason
why they shouldn’t arise from myself, since they represent
such a slight reality that I can’t even distinguish it from a
non-thing.

With regard to the vivid and clear elements in my ideas of
bodies, it appears that I could have borrowed some of these
from my idea of myself, namely substance, duration, number
and anything else of this kind. For example, I think that a
stone is a substance, or is a thing capable of existing indepen-
dently, and I also think that I am a substance. Admittedly I
conceive of myself as a thing that thinks and isn’t extended,
and of the stone as a thing that is extended and doesn’t
think, so that the two conceptions differ enormously; but

Meditations René Descartes Third Meditation

they seem to have the classification ‘substance’ in common.
Again, I perceive that I now exist, and remember that I have
existed •for some time; moreover, I have various thoughts
that I can •count; it is in these ways that I acquire the ideas
of •duration and •number that I can then transfer to other
things. As for all the other elements that make up the ideas
of bodies— extension, shape, position and movement—these
are not straightforwardly contained in me, since I am nothing
but a thinking thing; but since they are merely modes of
a substance, and I am a substance, it seems possible that
they are contained in me in some higher form. ·That is, I
am not myself extended, shaped etc., but because I am a
substance I am (so to speak) metaphysically one up on these
mere modes, which implies that I can contain within me
whatever it takes to cause the ideas of them·.

So there remains only the idea of God: is there any-
thing in that which couldn’t have originated in myself? By
the word ‘God’ I understand a substance that is infinite,
eternal, unchangeable, independent, supremely intelligent,
supremely powerful, which created myself and anything else
that may exist. The more carefully I concentrate on these
attributes, the less possible it seems that any of them could
have originated from me alone. So this whole discussion
implies that God necessarily exists.

It is true that my being a substance explains my having
the idea of substance; but it does not explain my having the
idea of an infinite substance. That must come from some
substance that is itself infinite. I am finite.

It might be thought that ·this is wrong, because· my
notion of the •infinite is arrived at merely by negating the
•finite, just as my conceptions of •rest and •darkness are
arrived at by negating •movement and •light. ·That would
be a mistake, however·. I clearly understand that there is
more reality in an infinite substance than in a finite one,

and hence that my perception of the infinite, i.e. God, is in
some way prior to my perception of the finite, i.e. myself.
Whenever I know that I doubt something or want something,
I understand that I lack something and am therefore not
wholly perfect. How could I grasp this unless I had an idea
of a more perfect being that enabled me to recognize my own
defects by comparison?

Nor can it be said that this idea of God could be ‘materially
false’, and thus have come from nothing, as may be the case
(I noted this a few moments ago) with the ideas of heat
and cold. On the contrary, it is utterly vivid and clear, and
contains in itself more representative reality than any other
idea; ·that is, it stands for something that is grander, more
powerful, more real, than any other idea stands for·; so it
is more true—less open to the suspicion of falsehood—than
any other idea. This idea of a supremely perfect and infinite
being is, I say, true in the highest degree; for although one
might imagine that such a being does not exist, it can’t be
supposed that the idea of such a being represents something
unreal in the way that the idea of cold perhaps does. The
idea is, moreover, utterly vivid and clear. It does not matter
that I don’t grasp the infinite, or that there are countless
additional attributes of God that I can’t grasp and perhaps
can’t even touch in my thought; for it is in the nature of the
infinite not to be grasped by a finite being like myself. It is
enough that I understand the infinite, and that I judge that
all the attributes that I clearly perceive and know to imply
some perfection—and perhaps countless others of which I
am ignorant—are present in God either straightforwardly or
in some higher form. This is enough to make the idea that
I have of God the truest and most vivid and clear of all my
ideas.

·Here is a possible objection to that line of thought·.
Perhaps I am greater than I myself understand: perhaps

Meditations René Descartes Third Meditation

all the perfections that I attribute to God are ones that I do
have in some potential form, and they merely haven’t yet
shown themselves in actuality. My knowledge is gradually
increasing, and I see no obstacle to its going on increasing to
infinity. I might then be able to use this increased ·and even-
tually infinite· knowledge to acquire all the other perfections
of God. In that case, I already have the potentiality for these
perfections—why shouldn’t this ·potentiality· be enough to
enable me to have caused the idea of them ·that is, to have
caused my idea of God·?

But all this [that is, the whole of the preceding paragraph] is
impossible ·for three reasons·. •First, though it is true that
my knowledge is increasing, and that I have many poten-
tialities that are not yet actual, this is all quite irrelevant to
the idea of God, which contains absolutely nothing that is
potential. Indeed, this gradual increase in knowledge is itself
the surest sign of imperfection, ·because if I am learning
more, that shows that there are things I don’t know, and
that is an imperfection in me·. •What is more, even if my
knowledge increases for ever, it will never actually be infinite,
since it will never reach the point where it isn’t capable of a
further increase; God, on the other hand, I take to be actually
infinite, so that nothing can be added to his perfection. •And,
thirdly, strictly speaking potential being is nothing; what it
takes to cause the representative being of an idea is actual
being.

If one concentrates carefully, all this is quite evident by
the natural light. But when I relax my concentration, and my
mental vision is blurred by the images of things I perceive
by the senses, I lose sight of the reasons why my idea of
more perfect being has to come from a being that really is
more perfect. So I want to push on with my enquiry, now
asking a new question: If the more perfect being didn’t exist,
could I exist? ·My hope is that the answer to this will yield a

new proof of the existence of a perfect being—a proof that it
will be easier for me to keep in mind even when I relax my
concentration·.

Well, if God didn’t exist, from what would I derive my
existence? It would have to come from myself, or from my
parents, or from some other beings less perfect than God
(a being more perfect than God, or even one as perfect, is
unthinkable).

If I had derived my existence from myself, I would not
now doubt or want or lack anything at all; for I would have
given myself all the perfections of which I have any idea. So I
would be God. I mustn’t suppose that the items I lack would
be harder to get than the ones I now have. On the contrary,
it would have been far more difficult for me—a thinking
thing or substance—to emerge out of nothing than merely
to acquire knowledge of the many things I’m ignorant about,
because that would merely be giving the substance certain
accidents. If I had derived my existence from myself—the
greater achievement—I certainly wouldn’t have denied myself
the knowledge in question, which is something much easier
to acquire, or indeed any of the attributes that I perceive to
be contained in the idea of God; for none of them seem any
harder to achieve. . . .

Here is a thought that might seem to undercut that
argument. Perhaps I have always existed as I do now.
Then wouldn’t it follow that there need be no cause for my
existence? No, it does not follow. For a life-span can be
divided into countless parts, each completely independent
of the others, so that from my existing at one time it doesn’t
follow that I exist at later times, unless some cause keeps
me in existence—one might say that it creates me afresh at
each moment. Anyone who thinks hard about the nature of
time will understand that what it takes to •bring a thing into
existence is also needed to •keep it in existence at each mo-

Meditations René Descartes Third Meditation

ment of its duration. So there’s no real distinction between
•preservation and •creation—only a conceptual one—and this
is something that the natural light makes evident.

So I have to ask myself whether I have the power to bring
it about that I, who now exist, will still exist a minute from
now. For since I am nothing but a thinking thing—or anyway
that is the only part of me that I am now concerned with—if
I had such a power I would undoubtedly be aware of it. But
I experience no such power, and this shows me quite clearly
that I depend ·for my continued existence· on some being
other than myself.

Perhaps this being is not God, though. Perhaps I was
produced by causes less perfect than God, such as my
parents. No; for as I have said before, it is quite clear
that there must be at least as much reality or perfection
in the cause as in the effect. And therefore, given that I
am a thinking thing and have within me some idea of God,
the cause of me—whatever it is—must itself be a thinking
thing and must have the idea of all the perfections that I
attribute to God. What is the cause of this cause of me?
If it is the cause of its own existence, then it is God; for if
it has the power of existing through its own strength, then
undoubtedly it also has the power of actually possessing
all the perfections of which it has an idea—that is, all the
perfections that I conceive to be in God. If on the other hand
it gets its existence from another cause, then the question
arises all over again regarding this further cause: Does it get
its existence from itself or from another cause? Eventually
we must reach the ultimate cause, and this will be God.

It is clear enough that this sequence of causes of causes
can’t run back to infinity, especially since I am dealing with
the cause that not only produced me in the past but also
preserves me at the present moment.

One might think this:
Several partial causes contributed to my creation;
I received the idea of one of the perfections that I
attribute to God from one cause, and the idea of
another from another. Each perfection is to be found
somewhere in the universe, but no one thing has them
all.

That can’t be right, because God’s simplicity—that is, the
unity or inseparability of all his attributes—is one of the
most important of the perfections that I understand him
to have. The idea of his perfections as united in a single
substance couldn’t have been placed in me by any cause
that didn’t also provide me with the ideas of the perfections
themselves; for no cause could have made me understand
that the perfections are united without at the same time
showing me what they are.

Lastly, as regards my parents, even if everything I have
ever believed about them is true, it is certainly not they
who keep me in existence. Insofar as I am a thinking thing,
indeed, they did not even make me; they merely brought
about an arrangement of matter that I have always regarded
as containing me (that is, containing my mind, for that is
all I now take myself to be). So my parents can’t be the
cause-of-me that I am enquiring about.

·Given the failure of every other candidacy for the role
of cause of me and of my idea of a most perfect being, I
infer that the only successful candidacy is God’s·. Thus,
I conclude that the mere fact that I exist and have within
me an idea of a most perfect being—that is, God—provides a
clear proof that God does indeed exist.

It remains for me only to ask how I received this idea from
God. I didn’t get it from the senses: it has never come to me
unexpectedly, as do most of the ideas that occur when I seem
to see and touch and hear things. And it’s not something

Meditations René Descartes Fourth Meditation

that I invented, either; for clearly I can’t take anything away
from it or to add anything to it. ·When an idea is sheerly
invented, the inventor is free to fiddle with it—add a bit here,
subtract a bit there—whereas my idea of God is a natural
unit that doesn’t invite or even permit such interference·.
The only remaining alternative is that my idea of God is
innate in me, just as the idea of myself is innate in me.

It is no surprise that God in creating me should have
placed this idea in me, to serve as a mark of the craftsman
stamped on his work. The mark need not be anything distinct
from the work itself. But the mere fact that God created me
makes it very believable that I am somehow made in his
image and likeness, and that I perceive that likeness in the
same way that I perceive myself. That is, when I turn my
mind’s eye upon myself, I understand that I am a thing that
•is incomplete and •dependent on something else, and that
•aspires without limit to ever greater and better things; but I
also understand at the same time that he on whom I depend
has within him all those greater things—not just indefinitely
but infinitely, not just potentially but actually—and hence

that he is God. The core of the argument is this: I couldn’t
exist with the nature that I have—that is, containing within
me the idea of God—if God didn’t really exist. By ‘God’ I
mean the very being the idea of whom is within me—the one
that has no defects and has all those perfections that I can’t
grasp but can somehow touch with my thought. This shows
clearly that it is not possible for him to be a deceiver, since
the natural light makes it clear that all fraud and deception
depend on some defect.

But before examining this point more carefully and in-
vestigating other truths that may be derived from it, I want
to pause here and spend some time contemplating God;
to reflect on his attributes and to gaze with wonder and
adoration on the beauty of this immense light, so far as the
eye of my darkened intellect can bear it. For just as we
believe through faith that the supreme happiness of •the
next life consists in contemplating the divine majesty, so
experience tells us that this same contemplation, though
much less perfect, provides the greatest joy we can have in
•this life.

Fourth Meditation:
Truth and falsity

In these past few days I have become used to keeping
my mind away from the senses; and I have become strongly
aware that very little is truly known about bodies, whereas
much more is known about the human mind and still more
about God. So now I find it easy to turn my mind away from

objects of the senses and the imagination, towards objects
of the intellect alone; these are quite separate from matter,
·whereas the objects of sense and imagination are mostly
made of matter·. Indeed, none of my ideas of corporeal [=
‘bodily’] things is as distinct as my idea of the human mind,

Meditations René Descartes Fourth Meditation

considered purely as a thinking thing with no size or shape
or other bodily characteristics. Now, when I consider the fact
that I have doubts—which means that I am incomplete and
dependent—that leads to my having a vivid and clear idea of
a being who is independent and complete, that is, an idea of
God. And from the mere fact that •I exist and have such an
idea, I infer that •God exists and that every moment of my
existence depends on him. This follows clearly; I am sure,
indeed, that the human intellect can’t know anything that is
more evident or more certain. And now that I can take into
account the true God, in whom all the treasures of wisdom
and knowledge lie hidden, I think I can see a way through to
knowledge of other things in the universe.

To begin with, I see that it is impossible that God should
ever deceive me. Only someone who has something wrong
with him will engage in trickery or deception. That someone
is able to deceive others may be a sign of his skill or power,
but his wanting to deceive them is a sign of his malice or
weakness; and those are not to be found in God.

Next, I know from experience that I have a faculty of
judgment; and this, like everything else I have, was given to
me by God. Since God doesn’t want to deceive me, I am sure
that he didn’t give me a faculty of judgment that would lead
me into error while I was using it correctly.

That would settle the matter, except for one difficulty:
what I have just said seems to imply that I can never be in
error. If everything that is in me comes from God, and he
didn’t equip me with a capacity for making mistakes, doesn’t
it follow that I can never go wrong in my beliefs? Well, I know
by experience that I am greatly given to errors; but when I
focus on God to the exclusion of everything else, I find in
him no cause of error or falsity. In looking for the cause of
my errors, I am helped by this thought: as well as having
a real and positive idea of God (a being who is supremely

perfect), I also have what you might call a negative idea
of nothingness (that which is furthest from all perfection). I
realize that I am somewhere in between God and nothingness,
or between supreme being and non-being. Now, the positive
reality that I have been given by the supreme being contains
nothing that could lead me astray in my beliefs. I make
mistakes, not surprisingly, because my nature involves
nothingness or non-being—that is, because I am not myself
the supreme being, and lack countless perfections. So error
is not something real that depends on God, but is merely
·something negative, a lack·, a defect. There is, therefore,
nothing positively error-producing in the faculty of judgment
that God gave me. When I go wrong I do so because the
faculty of true judgment that I have from God is in my case
not free of all limitations, ·that is, because it partly involves
nothingness·.

That is still not quite right. For error isn’t a mere negation.
·Pebbles and glaciers lack knowledge, and in them that lack
is a mere negation—the absence of something that there is
no reason for them to possess. I have lacks of that kind
too, mere negations such my lack of the ability to fly, or to
multiply two 30-digit prime numbers in my head. But my
tendency to error isn’t like that·. Rather, it is a privation,
that is, a lack of some knowledge that I should have, ·which
means that I still have a problem about how it relates to God·.
When I think hard about God, it seems impossible that he
should have given me a faculty that lacks some perfection
that it should have. The more skilled the craftsman, the
more perfect the thing that he makes; so one would expect
something made by the supreme creator to be complete and
perfect in every way. It is clear, furthermore, that God could
have made me in such a way that I was never mistaken; and
there is no doubt that he always chooses to do what is best.
Does this show that my making mistakes is better than my

Meditations René Descartes Fourth Meditation

not doing so?
Thinking harder about this, ·three helpful thoughts come

to me. Two concern our knowledge of God’s reasons gen-
erally; the third is specifically about human error·. (1) I
realize that it is no cause for surprise if I don’t always
understand why God acts as he does. I may well find other
things he has done whose reasons elude me; and that is
no reason to doubt his existence. I am now aware that my
nature is very weak and limited, whereas God’s nature is
immense, incomprehensible and infinite; so of course he can
do countless things whose reasons I can’t know. That alone
is reason enough to give up, as totally useless, the attempt
that physicists make to understand the world in terms of
what things are for, ·that is, in terms of God’s purposes·.
Only a very rash man would think he could discover what
God’s impenetrable purposes are.

(2) In estimating whether God’s works are perfect, we
should look at the universe as a whole, not at created things
one by one. Something that might seem very imperfect if it
existed on its own has a function in relation to the rest of
the universe, and may be perfect when seen in that light.
My decision to doubt everything has left me sure of the
existence of only two things, God and myself; but when I
think about God’s immense power I have to admit that he
did or could have made many things in addition to myself,
so that there may be a universal scheme of things in which
I have a place. ·If that is so, then judgments about what is
perfect or imperfect in me should be made on the basis not
just of my intrinsic nature but also of my role or function in
the universe as a whole·.

(3) My errors are the only evidence I have that I am
imperfect. When I look more closely into these errors of
mine, I discover that they have two co-operating causes—my
faculty of knowledge and my faculty of choice or freedom of

the will. My errors, that is, depend on both (a) my intellect
and (b) my will. ·Let us consider these separately·. (a)
The intellect doesn’t affirm or deny anything; its role is
only to present me with ideas regarding which I can make
judgments; so strictly speaking it doesn’t involve any error
at all. There may be many existing things of which my
intellect gives me no ideas, but it isn’t strictly correct to
say that I am deprived of such ideas, as it would be if my
nature somehow entitled me to have them. I can give no
reason why God ought to have given me more ideas than
he did. Just because I understand someone to be a skilled
craftsman, I don’t infer that he ought to have put into each
of his works all the perfections he can give to some of them.
So all I can say is that there are some ideas that I don’t have;
this is a purely negative fact about me ·like the fact that I
can’t fly; it doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with
my nature·. (b) I can’t complain that God gave me a will
or freedom of choice that isn’t extensive or perfect enough,
since I know by experience that will is entirely without limits.
My will is so perfect and so great that I can’t conceive of its
becoming even greater and more perfect; it is a striking fact
that this is true of •my will and not of •any other aspect of
my nature. I can easily see that my faculty of understanding
is finite, to put it mildly; and I immediately conceive of a
much greater •understanding—indeed, of a supremely great
and infinite one; and the fact that I can form such an idea
shows me that God actually has such an understanding.
Similarly, if I examine •memory and •imagination and the
rest, I discover that in my case these faculties are weak and
limited, while in God they are immeasurable. It is only the
will, or freedom of choice, which I experience as so great
that I can’t make sense of the idea of its being even greater:
indeed, my thought of myself as being somehow like God
depends primarily upon my will. God’s will is incomparably

Meditations René Descartes Fourth Meditation

greater than mine in two respects: •it is accompanied by,
and made firm and effective by, much more knowledge and
power than I have; and •it has far more objects than my will
does—·that is, God makes more choices and decisions than
I do. But these comparisons—having to do with •the amount
of knowledge that accompanies and helps the will, or with
•the number of states of affairs to which it is applied—do
not concern the will in itself, but rather its relations to
other things·. When the will is considered ·not relationally,
but· strictly in itself, God’s will does not seem any greater
than mine. The will is simply one’s ability to do or not do
something—to accept or reject a proposition, to pursue a
goal or avoid something. More accurately: the ·freedom of
the· will consists in the fact that when the intellect presents
us with a candidate for acceptance or denial, or for pursuit
or avoidance, we have no sense that we are pushed one way
or the other by any external force. I can be free without
being inclined both ways. Indeed, the more strongly I incline
in one direction the more free my choice is—if my inclination
comes from •natural knowledge (that is, from my seeing
clearly that reasons of truth and goodness point that way)
or from •divine grace (that is, from some mental disposition
that God has given me). Freedom is never lessened—indeed
it is increased and strengthened—by •natural knowledge and
•divine grace. When no reason inclines me in one direction
rather than another, I have a feeling of indifference—·that is,
of its not mattering which way I go·—and that is the poorest
kind of freedom. What it displays is freedom, considered not
as a perfection but rather as a lack of knowledge—a kind of
negation. If I always saw clearly what was true and good,
I should never have to spend time thinking about what to
believe or do; and then I would be wholly free although I was
never in a state of indifference.

So the power of willing that God has given me, being
extremely broad in its scope and also perfect of its kind, is not
the cause of my mistakes. Nor is my power of understanding
to blame: God gave it to me, so there can be no error in
its activities; when I understand something I undoubtedly
understand it correctly. Well, then, where do my mistakes
come from? Their source is the fact that my will has a wider
scope than my intellect has, ·so that I am free to form beliefs
on topics that I don’t understand·. Instead of ·behaving as I
ought to, namely by· restricting my will to the territory that
my understanding covers, ·that is, suspending judgment
when I am not intellectually in control·, I let my will run
loose, applying it to matters that I don’t understand. In such
cases there is nothing to stop the will from veering this way
or that, so it easily turns away from what is true and good.
That is the source of my error and sin.

Here is an example ·of how (1) the will’s behaviour when
there is true understanding contrasts with (2) its behaviour
when there isn’t·. (1) A while ago I asked whether anything
in the world exists, and I came to realize that the fact of
my raising this question shows quite clearly that I exist. I
understood this so vividly that I couldn’t help judging that it
was true. This was not the ‘couldn’t help’ that comes from
being compelled by some external force. What happened was
just this: a great light in the intellect was followed by a great
inclination in the will. I was not in a state of indifference,
·feeling that I could as well go one way as the other·; but this
lack of indifference was a measure of how spontaneous and
free my belief was. ·It would have indicated unfreedom only
if it had come from the compulsion of something external,
rather than coming from within myself·. (2) As well as
knowing that I exist, at least as a thinking thing, I have
in my mind an idea of corporeal nature; and I am not sure
whether my thinking nature—which makes me what I am—is

Meditations René Descartes Fourth Meditation

the same as this corporeal nature or different from it. I take
it that my intellect has not yet found any convincing reason
for either answer; so I am indifferent with regard to this
question—nothing pushes or pulls me towards one answer
or the other, or indeed towards giving any answer.

The will is indifferent not only when the intellect is
wholly ignorant but also when it doesn’t have clear enough
knowledge at the time when the will is trying to reach a
decision. A probable conjecture may pull me one way; but
when I realize that it is a mere conjecture and not a certain
and indubitable reason, that in itself will push me the other
way. My experience in the last few days confirms this: the
mere fact that I found all my previous beliefs to be somewhat
open to doubt was enough to switch me from confidently
believing them to supposing them to be wholly false.

If when I don’t perceive the truth vividly and clearly
enough I simply suspend judgment, it’s clear that I am
behaving correctly and avoiding error. It is a misuse of
my free will to have an opinion in such cases: if I choose the
wrong side I shall be in error; and even if I choose the right
side, I shall be at fault because I’ll have come to the truth
by sheer chance and not through a perception of my intellect.
The latter, as the natural light shows me clearly, should be
what influences my will when I affirm things. I have said
that error is essentially a privation—a lack of something that
I should have—and now I know what this privation consists
in. It doesn’t lie in •the will that God has given me, or even
in •the mode of operation that God has built into it; rather it
consists in •my misuse of my will. ·Specifically, it consists in
•my lack of restraint in the exercise of my will, when I form
opinions on matters that I don’t clearly understand·.

I can’t complain that God did not give me a greater power
of understanding than he did: created intellects are naturally
finite, and so they naturally lack understanding of many

things. God has never owed me anything, so I should thank
him for his great generosity to me, rather than feeling cheated
because he did not give me everything.

Nor can I reasonably complain that God gave me a will
that extends more widely than my intellect. The will is a
single unitary thing; its nature is such, it seems, that there
could be no way of taking away parts of it. Anyway, should
not the great extent of my will be a cause for further thanks
to him who gave it to me?

Finally, I must not complain that God consents to the
acts of will in which I go wrong. What there is in these acts
that comes from God is wholly true and good; and it is a
perfection in me that I can perform them. Falsity and error
are essentially a privation; and this privation isn’t something
to which God consents, because it isn’t a thing at all. Indeed,
when it is considered in relation to God as its cause, it isn’t
really a privation but rather a mere negation. ·That is, it
is a mere fact about something that is not the case; it does
not involve the notion that it ought to be the case. I ought
to restrain my will when I don’t understand, but it isn’t
true that God ought to have forced such restraint on me·.
God has given me the freedom to assent or not assent in
cases where he did not give me clear understanding; he is
surely not to blame for that. But I am to blame for misusing
that freedom by coming to conclusions on matters that I
don’t fully understand. Of course God easily could have
arranged things so that, while keeping all my freedom and
still being limited in what I understand, I never made a
mistake. He could do this either by •giving me a vivid and
clear understanding of everything that I was ever likely to
think about; or by •forcing me always to remember that I
ought not to form opinions on matters I don’t vividly and
clearly understand. I can see that if God had made me this
way, I would—considered just in myself, as if nothing else

Meditations René Descartes Fourth Meditation

existed—have been more perfect than I actually am. But the
universe as a whole may have some perfection that requires
that some parts of it be capable of error while others are
not, so that it would be a worse universe if all its parts were
exactly alike ·in being immune from error·. I am not entitled
to complain about God’s giving me a lower role in his scheme
of things ·by selecting me as one of the creatures that isn’t
protected from error·.

What is more, even if I have no power to avoid error by
•having a vivid perception of everything I have to think about,
I can avoid it simply by •remembering to withhold judgment
on anything that isn’t clear to me. I admit to having the
weakness that I can’t keep my attention fixed on a single
item of knowledge (·such as the no-judgment-when-clarity-of-
perception-is-lacking rule·); but by attentive and repeated
meditation I can get myself to remember it as often as the
need arises, and thus to get into the habit of avoiding error.

This is where man’s greatest and most important perfec-

tion is to be found; so today’s meditation, with its enquiry
into the cause of error, has been very profitable. I must be
right in my explanation of the cause of error. If I restrain
my will so that I form opinions only on what the intellect
vividly and clearly reveals, I cannot possibly go wrong. Here
is why. Every vivid and clear perception is undoubtedly
something real and positive; so it can’t come from nothing,
and must come from God. He is supremely perfect; it would
be downright contradictory to suppose that he is a deceiver.
So the vivid and clear perception must be true. So today I
have learned not only how to avoid error but also how to
arrive at the truth. It is beyond question that I shall reach
the truth if I think hard enough about •the things that I
perfectly understand, keeping them separate from •all the
other matters in which my thoughts are more confused and
obscure. That is what I shall be really careful to do from now
on.

First Enquiry David Hume 12: The sceptical philosophy

‘But with regard to your main line of thought’ (I continued)
‘there occurs to me a difficulty that I shall just propose to
you without insisting on it, lest it lead into reasonings of
too subtle and delicate a nature. Briefly, then, I very much
doubt that it’s possible for a cause to be known only by its
effect (as you have supposed all through) or to be so singular
and particular that it has no parallel or similarity with any
other cause or object we have ever observed. It is only when
two kinds of objects are found to be constantly conjoined
that we can infer one from the other; and if we encountered
an effect that was entirely singular, and couldn’t be placed
in any known kind, I don’t see that we could conjecture
or infer anything at all concerning its cause. If experience
and observation and analogy really are the only guides we

can reasonably follow in inferences of this sort, both the
effect and the cause must have some similarity to other
effects and causes that we already know and have found
often to be conjoined with each other. I leave it to you to
think through the consequences of this principle. I shall
merely remark that, as the antagonists of Epicurus always
suppose that the universe, an effect that is quite singular
and unparalleled, is proof of a god, a cause no less singular
and unparalleled, your reasonings about this seem at least
to merit our attention. There is, I admit, some difficulty in
grasping how we can ever return from the cause to the effect,
and by reasoning from our ideas of the cause infer anything
new about the effect.’

Section 12: The sceptical philosophy

Philosophical arguments proving the existence of a god and
refuting the fallacies of atheists outnumber the arguments
on any other topic. Yet most religious philosophers still
disagree about whether any man can be so blinded as to
be an atheist. How shall we reconcile these contradictions?
The knights-errant who wandered about to clear the world
of dragons and giants never had the least doubt that these
monsters existed!

The sceptic is another enemy of religion who naturally
arouses the indignation of all religious authorities and of
the more solemn philosophers; yet it’s certain that nobody
ever met such an absurd creature ·as a sceptic·, or talked
with a man who had no opinion on any subject, practical

or theoretical. So the question naturally arises: What is
meant by ‘sceptic’? And how far it is possible to push these
philosophical principles of doubt and uncertainty?

Descartes and others have strongly recommended one
kind of scepticism, to be practised in advance of philosophy
or any other studies. It preserves us, they say, against
error and rash judgment. It recommends that we should
doubt not only all our former opinions and principles but
also our very faculties. The reliability of our faculties, these
philosophers say, is something we must be assured of by a
chain of reasoning, deduced from some first principle that
cannot possibly be fallacious or deceitful. But there is no
such first principle that has an authority above others that

First Enquiry David Hume 12: The sceptical philosophy

are self-evident and convincing. And even if there were
one, we couldn’t advance a step beyond it except by using
those very faculties that we are supposed to be calling into
question. Cartesian doubt, therefore, if someone could attain
to it (as plainly nobody could), would be entirely incurable,
and no reasoning could ever bring us to confident beliefs
about anything.

However, a more moderate degree of such scepticism can
be quite reasonable, and is a necessary preparation for the
study of philosophy: it makes us impartial in our judgments
and weans our minds from prejudices that we may have
arrived at thoughtlessly or taken in through education. If we

•begin with clear and self-evident principles,
•move forward cautiously, getting a secure footing at
each step,

•check our conclusions frequently, and
•carefully examine their consequences,

we shall move slowly, and not get far; but these are the only
methods by which we can hope ever to establish conclusions
which we are sure are true and which will last.

Another kind of scepticism has arisen out of scientific
enquiries that are supposed to have shown that human
mental faculties are either absolutely deceitful or not capable
of reaching fixed conclusions about any of the puzzling topics
on which they are commonly employed. Even our senses
are questioned by a certain kind of philosopher; and the
maxims of everyday life are subjected to the same doubt
as are the deepest principles of metaphysics and theology.
Some philosophers accept these paradoxical tenets (if they
may be called tenets), while many others try to refute them;
so it’s natural for us to wonder about them, and to look for
the arguments on which they may be based.

I needn’t dwell on the well-worn arguments that sceptics
have used down the ages to discredit the senses, such as

the arguments drawn from the untrustworthy nature of our
sense organs, which very often lead us astray: the crooked
appearance of an oar half in water, the different ways an
object can look depending on how far away it is, the double
images that arise from pressing one eye, and many other
such phenomena. These sceptical points serve only to prove
that the senses, taken on their own, shouldn’t automatically
be trusted, and that if they are to serve as criteria of truth
and falsehood we must adjust the answers they give us by
bringing reason to bear on facts about •the nature of the
medium—·e.g. the water through which we see the lower half
of the oar·—•the distance of the object, and •the condition of
the sense organ. But other arguments against the senses go
deeper, and are harder to meet.

It seems clear that •we humans are naturally, instinc-
tively inclined to trust our senses, and that •without any
reasoning—indeed, almost before the use of reason—we take
it that there is an external universe that doesn’t depend
on our perceiving it and would have existed if there had
never been any perceiving creatures or if we had all been
annihilated. Even the animals are governed by a similar
opinion, and maintain this belief in external objects in all
their thoughts, plans and actions.

It also seems clear that when men follow this blind and
powerful instinct of nature they always suppose that •the
very images that their senses present to them are •the
external objects that they perceive; it never crosses their
minds that •sensory images are merely representations of
•external objects. This very table that we see as white
and feel as hard is believed to exist independently of our
perception, and to be something external to our mind, which
perceives it. Our presence doesn’t bring it into existence,
and our absence doesn’t annihilate it. It stays in existence
(we think), complete and unchanging, independent of any

First Enquiry David Hume 12: The sceptical philosophy

facts about intelligent beings who perceive it or think about
it.

But the slightest philosophy is enough to destroy this
basic belief that all men have. For philosophy teaches us
that images (or perceptions) are the only things that can
ever be present to the mind, and that the senses serve only
to bring these images before the mind and cannot put our
minds into any immediate relation with external objects.
The table that we see seems to shrink as we move away
from it; but the real table that exists independently of us
doesn’t alter; so what was present to the mind wasn’t the
real table but only an image of it. These are the obvious
dictates of reason; and no-one who thinks about it has ever
doubted that when we say ‘this house’ and ‘that tree’ the
things we are referring to are nothing but perceptions in the
mind—fleeting copies or representations of other things that
are independent of us and don’t change.

To that extent, then, reason compels us to contradict or
depart from the basic instincts of nature, and to adopt a
new set of views about the evidence of our senses. ·These
views amount to a philosophical system according to which
(1) we perceive only images, not external objects, but (2)
there are external objects, and images represent them·. But
when philosophy tries to justify this new system, and put
to rest the carping objections of the sceptics, it finds itself
in an awkward position ·regarding the claim (2) that there
are external objects that our images represent·. Philosophy
can no longer rely on the idea that natural instincts are
infallible and irresistible, for those instincts led us to a
quite different system that is admitted to be fallible and
even wrong. And to justify ·the external-object part of·
this purported philosophical system by a chain of clear
and convincing argument—or even by any appearance of
argument—is more than anyone can do.

By what argument can it be proved that the perceptions
of the mind must be caused by •external objects that are
perfectly distinct from them and yet similar to them (if that
were possible), rather than arising from •the energy of the
mind itself, or from •the activities of some invisible and un-
known spirit, or from •some other cause still more unknown
to us? It is admitted that many of these perceptions—e.g.
in dreams, madness, and other diseases—don’t in fact arise
from anything external, ·so how could we prove that others
do arise from something external·? In any case, we are
utterly unable to explain how a body could so act on a mind
as to convey an image of itself to a mental substance whose
nature is supposed to be so different from—even contrary
to—its own nature.

Are the perceptions of the senses produced by external
objects that resemble them? This is a question of fact.
Where shall we look for an answer to it? To experience,
surely, as we do with all other questions of that kind. But
here experience is and must be entirely silent. The mind
never has anything present to it except the perceptions, and
can’t possibly experience their connection with objects. The
belief in such a connection, therefore, has no foundation in
reasoning ·because the reasoning would have to start from
something known through experience·.

We might try to prove that our senses are truthful by
appealing to the truthfulness of God, but that would be a
strange direction for the argument to take, ·for two reasons·.
(1) If the fallibility of our senses implied that God is untruth-
ful, then our senses would never mislead us; because it isn’t
possible that God should ever deceive. (2) Anyway, once the
external world has been called in question we are left with
no arguments to prove that God exists or to show what his
attributes are.

The deeper and more philosophical sceptics, trying to cast

First Enquiry David Hume 12: The sceptical philosophy

doubt on all subjects of human knowledge and enquiry, will
always triumph when it comes to the question of external
bodies. ‘Do you follow your natural instincts and inclina-
tions’, they may say, ‘when you affirm the truthfulness of
your senses? But those instincts lead you to believe that the
perception or image that you experience is itself the external
object. Do you reject that view, in order to accept the more
reasonable opinion that perceptions are only representations
of something external? In that case you are departing from
your natural inclinations and more obvious opinions; and
yet you still can’t satisfy your reason, which can never find
any convincing argument from experience to prove that your
perceptions are connected with external objects.’

Another sceptical line of thought—somewhat like that
one—has deep philosophical roots, and might be worth
attending to if there were any point in digging that far
down in order to discover arguments that can be of so
little serious use. All modern enquirers agree that all the
sensible qualities of objects—such as hard, soft, hot, cold,
white, black, etc.—are merely secondary; they don’t exist in
the objects themselves (it is believed), and are perceptions
of the mind with no external pattern or model that they
represent. If this is granted regarding secondary qualities, it
also holds for the supposed primary qualities of extension
and solidity, which are no more entitled to be called ‘primary’
than the others are. The idea of extension comes purely
from the senses of sight and touch; and if all the qualities
that are perceived by the senses are in the mind rather than
in the object, that must hold also for the idea of extension,

which wholly depends on sensible ideas, i.e. on the ideas of
secondary qualities. ·To see that something is extended, you
have to see colours; to feel that it is extended, you have to feel
hardness or softness·. The only escape from this conclusion
is to assert that we get the ideas of those ‘primary’ qualities
through abstraction; but the doctrine of abstraction turns
out under careful scrutiny to be unintelligible, and even
absurd. An extension that is neither tangible nor visible can’t
possibly be conceived; and a tangible or visible extension
that is neither hard nor soft, black nor white, is equally
beyond the reach of human conception. Let anyone try to
conceive a triangle in general, which has no particular length
or proportion of sides, and he will soon see the absurdity of
all the scholastic notions concerning abstraction and general
ideas.13

Thus the first philosophical objection to the belief in
external objects is this: If the belief is based on natural
instinct it is contrary to reason; and if it is attributed to
reason it is contrary to natural instinct, and anyway isn’t
supported by any rational evidence that would convince
an impartial person who thought about it. The second
objection goes further and represents this belief as contrary
to reason—at least if reason says that all sensible qualities
are in the mind and not in the object. Deprive matter of
all its intelligible qualities, both primary and secondary,
and you in a way annihilate it and leave only a certain
mysterious something as the cause of our perceptions, a
notion so imperfect that no sceptic will think it worthwhile
to argue against it.

13This argument is drawn from Dr. Berkeley; and indeed most of the writings of that able author form the best lessons of scepticism that are to be found
either among the ancient or modern philosophers. Yet on his title-page he claims, no doubt sincerely, to have composed his book against the sceptics
as well as against atheists and free-thinkers. But though his arguments are otherwise intended, they are all in fact merely sceptical. This is shown by
the fact that they cannot be answered yet do not convince. Their only effect is to cause the momentary bewilderment and confusion that is the result of
scepticism.

First Enquiry David Hume 12: The sceptical philosophy

Part 2

There may seem to be something wild about the sceptics’
attempt to destroy reason by argument and reasoning; yet
that’s what all their enquiries and disputes amount to. They
try to find objections both to our abstract reasonings and to
reasonings about matter of fact and existence.

The chief objection to abstract reasonings comes from
the ideas of space and time. Those ideas, when viewed
carelessly as we view them in everyday life, are very clear
and intelligible; but when we look into them more closely
they turn out to involve principles that seem full of absurdity
and contradiction. No priestly dogmas, invented on purpose
to tame and subdue the rebellious reason of mankind, ever
shocked common sense more than the doctrine of the infinite
divisibility of extension, with its consequences that are
ceremoniously paraded by geometers and metaphysicians as
though they were something to be proud of. ·For example·:

A real quantity that is infinitely less than any finite
quantity, and contains quantities that are infinitely
less than itself, and so on to infinity—

this bold, enormous edifice is too weighty to be supported by
any demonstration, because it offends against the clearest
and most natural principles of human reason.14

But what makes the matter more extraordinary is that
these seemingly absurd opinions are supported by a chain of
reasoning that seems clear and utterly natural, and we can’t
accept the premises without accepting the conclusions. The
geometrical proofs regarding the properties of circles and
triangles are as convincing and satisfactory as they could

possibly be; but if we accept them, how can we deny that
•the angle of contact between any circle and its tan-
gent is infinitely less than any angle between straight
lines, and that as the circle gets larger •the angle of
contact becomes still smaller, ad infinitum?

The demonstration of these principles seems as flawless as
the one proving that the three angles of a triangle equal
180 degrees, though the latter conclusion is natural and
easy while the former is pregnant with contradiction and
absurdity. Reason here seems to be thrown into a kind of
bewilderment and indecision which, without prompting from
any sceptic, makes it unsure of itself and of the ground
it walks on. It sees a bright light that illuminates some
places; but right next to them there is the most profound
darkness. Caught between these, reason is so dazzled and
confused that there is hardly any topic on which it can reach
a confident conclusion.

The absurdity of these bold conclusions of the abstract
sciences seems to become even more conspicuous with
regard to time than it is with extension. An infinite number
of real parts of time, passing in succession and gone through
·completely·, one after another—this appears to be such an
obvious contradiction that nobody, one would think, could
bring himself to believe it unless his judgment had been
corrupted, rather than being improved, by the sciences.

Yet still reason must remain restless and unquiet, even
with regard to the scepticism it is driven to by these seeming
absurdities and contradictions. We can’t make sense of the
thought that a clear, distinct idea might contain something

14Whatever disputes there may be about mathematical points, we must allow that there are physical points—that is, parts of extension that cannot be
divided or lessened either by the eye or imagination. So these images that are present to the imagination or the senses are absolutely indivisible, and
consequently must be regarded by mathematicians as infinitely less than any real part of extension; yet nothing appears more certain to reason than that
an infinite number of them composes an infinite extension. This holds with even more force of an infinite number of the infinitely small parts of extension
that are still supposed to be, themselves, infinitely divisible.

First Enquiry David Hume 12: The sceptical philosophy

that is contradictory to itself or to some other clear, distinct
idea; this is indeed as absurd a proposition as we can
think of. So this scepticism about some of the paradoxical
conclusions of mathematics—·a scepticism which implies
that some of our clear, distinct ideas contradict others·—is
itself something we must be sceptical about, approaching it
in a doubting, hesitant frame of mind.15

Sceptical objections to reasonings about matters of fact
are of two kinds—(1) everyday informal objections, and (2)
philosophical ones. (1) The informal objections are based
on •the natural weakness of human understanding, •the
contradictory opinions that have been held at different times
and in different countries, •the variations of our judgment
in sickness and health, youth and old age, prosperity and
adversity, •the perpetual differences of opinion between
different individuals—and many other considerations of that
kind, but there is no need to go on about them. These
objections are weak. For as in ordinary life we reason every
moment regarding fact and existence, and can’t survive
without continually doing so, no objections that are based on
this procedure can be sufficient to undermine it. The great
subverter of excessive scepticism is action, practical projects,
the occupations of everyday life. Sceptical principles may
flourish and triumph in the philosophy lecture-room, where
it is indeed hard if not impossible to refute them. But as soon
as they •come out of the shadows, •are confronted by the real

things that our beliefs and emotions are addressed to, and
thereby •come into conflict with the more powerful principles
of our nature, sceptical principles vanish like smoke and
leave the most determined sceptic in the same ·believing·
condition as other mortals.

(2) The sceptic, therefore, had better stay in the area
where he does best, and present the philosophical objections
whose roots run deeper ·than the facts on which the informal
objections are based·. These seem to provide him with plenty
of victories. He can rightly insist

•that all our evidence for any matter of fact that lies
beyond the testimony of sense or memory is entirely
based on the relation of cause and effect; item •that
our only idea of this relation is the idea of two kinds
of event that have frequently been associated with one
another; item •that we have no argument to convince
us that kinds of event that we have often found to be
associated in the past will be so in future;

•and that what leads us to this inference is merely
custom—a certain instinct of our nature—which it is
indeed hard to resist but which like any other instinct
may be wrong and deceitful.

While the sceptic presses these points, he is in a strong
position, and seems to destroy all assurance and conviction,
at least for a while. (In a way, what he is showing is not
his strength but rather his and everyone’s weakness!) These

15We might be able to avoid these absurdities and contradictions if we admitted that there is no such thing as abstract or general ideas, properly speaking;
but that all general ideas are really particular ones attached to a general term which brings to mind other particular ideas which in some way resemble
the idea that is present to the mind. Thus when the word ‘horse’ is pronounced, we immediately form the idea of a black or a white animal of a particular
size and shape; but as that word is also usually applied to animals of other colours, shapes and sizes, these ideas are easily recalled even when they
are not actually present to the imagination; so that our reasoning can proceed in the same way as if they were actually present. If this is accepted—and
it seems reasonable—it follows that the ideas of quantity that mathematicians reason with are particular ones, i.e. ideas of the kind that come through
the senses and imagination; in which case those ideas cannot be infinitely divisible. At this point I merely drop that hint, without developing it in detail.
It does seem to be the readiest solution for these difficulties. We need some solution if the mathematicians are not to be exposed to the ridicule and
contempt of ignorant people.

First Enquiry David Hume 12: The sceptical philosophy

arguments of his could be developed at greater length, if
there were any reason to think that doing this would be
useful to mankind.

That brings me to the chief and most unanswerable
objection to excessive scepticism, namely that no lasting
good can ever result from it while it remains in its full force
and vigour. We need only ask such a sceptic: ‘What do
you want? What do you intend to achieve through your
sceptical arguments?’ He is immediately at a loss, and
doesn’t know what to answer. A Copernican or Ptolemaic
who supports a particular system of astronomy may hope
to produce in his audience beliefs that will remain constant
and long-lasting. A Stoic or Epicurean displays principles
which may not last, but which have an effect on conduct
and behaviour. But a Pyrrhonian [= ‘extreme sceptic’; Pyrrho
was the first notable sceptic in ancient Greece] cannot expect his
philosophy to have any steady influence on the mind, and
if it did, he couldn’t expect the influence to benefit society.
On the contrary, if he will admit anything he must admit
that if his principles were universally and steadily accepted,
all human life would come to an end. All discourse and all
action would immediately cease; and men would remain in
a total lethargy until their miserable lives came to an end
through lack of food, drink and shelter. It is true that this
fatal outcome is not something we really have to fear: nature
is always too strong for principle. And though a Pyrrhonian
may throw himself or others into a momentary bewilderment
and confusion by his deep arguments, the first and most
trivial event in life will put all his doubts and worries to
flight, and will leave him—in every aspect of his actions
and beliefs—in just the same position as any other kind
of philosopher, and indeed the same as someone who had
never concerned himself with philosophical researches at
all. When he awakes from his dream, the sceptic will be the

first to join in the laughter against himself and to admit that
all his objections are mere amusement and can only serve
to show how odd and freakish the situation of mankind is:
we must act and reason and believe, but however hard we
try we can’t find a satisfactory basis for those operations
and can’t remove the objections that can be brought against
them.

Part 3

There is indeed a milder kind of scepticism that may be
both durable and useful. It may be a part of what results
from Pyrrhonism, or excessive scepticism, when its undis-
criminating doubts are modified a little by common sense
and reflection. Most people are naturally apt to be positive
and dogmatic in their opinions; they see only one side of
an issue, have no idea of any arguments going the other
way, and recklessly commit themselves to the principles
that seem to them right, with no tolerance for those who
hold opposing views. Pausing to reflect, or balancing ar-
guments pro and con, only serves to get them muddled,
to damp down their emotions, and to delay their actions.
They are very uncomfortable in this state, and are thus
impatient to escape from it; and they think they can keep
away from it—the further the better—by the violence of their
assertions and the obstinacy of their beliefs. But if these
dogmatic reasoners became aware of how frail the human
understanding is, even at its best and most cautious, this
awareness would naturally lead to their being less dogmatic
and outspoken, less sure of themselves and less prejudiced
against antagonists. The illiterate may reflect on the fact
that learned people, despite all their advantages of study and
reflection, are often cautious and tentative in their opinions.
If any of the learned should be temperamentally inclined to

First Enquiry David Hume 12: The sceptical philosophy

pride and obstinacy, a small dose of Pyrrhonism might lessen
their pride by showing them that the few advantages they
have over other (·unlearned·) men don’t amount to much
when compared with the universal perplexity and confusion
that is inherent in human nature. There is, in short, a degree
of doubt and caution and modesty that every reasoner ought
to have at all times in every context of enquiry.

Another kind of moderate scepticism that may be useful
to mankind, and may be the natural result of Pyrrhonian
doubts, is the limitation of our enquiries to the subjects
that our narrow human understanding is best equipped to
deal with. The imagination of man naturally soars into the
heights: it rejoices in whatever is remote and extraordinary,
and runs off uncontrollably into the most distant parts
of space and time in order to avoid the familiar objects
that it has become used to. A faculty of judgment that
is working properly proceeds in the opposite way: it avoids
all distant and high enquiries, and confines itself to subjects
that we meet with in everyday activities and experience,
leaving grander topics to poets and orators or to priests
and politicians. The best way for us to be brought into
this healthy frame of mind is for us to become thoroughly
convinced of the force of Pyrrhonian doubt, and to see that
our only possible escape from it is through the strong power
of natural instinct. Those who are drawn to philosophy will
still continue their researches, attracted by the immediate
pleasure of this activity and by their realization that philo-
sophical doctrines are nothing but organized and corrected
versions of the thoughts of everyday life. But they will never
be tempted to go beyond everyday life so long as they bear
in mind the imperfection—the narrowness of scope, and the
inaccuracy—of their own faculties. Given that we can’t even
provide a satisfactory reason why we believe after a thousand
experiences that a stone will fall or fire will burn, can we ever

be confident in any of our beliefs about the origin of worlds,
or about the unfolding of nature from and to eternity?

The slightest enquiry into the natural powers of the
human mind, and the comparison of •those powers with
•the topics the mind studies, will be enough to make anyone
willing to limit the scope of his enquiries in the way I have
proposed. Let us then consider what are the proper subjects
of science and enquiry.

It seems to me that the only objects of the abstract
sciences—the ones whose results are rigorously proved—are
quantity and number, and that it’s mere sophistry and
illusion to try to extend this more perfect sort of knowledge
beyond these bounds. The component parts of quantity
and number are entirely similar; ·for example, the area of
a given triangle is made of the same elements as the area
of a given square, so that the question of whether the two
areas are equal can at least come up·. For this reason, the
relations amongst the parts of quantity and number become
intricate and involved; and nothing can be more intriguing,
as well as useful, than to trace in various ways their equality
or inequality through their different appearances. But all
other ideas are obviously distinct and different from each
other; and so with them we can never go further—however
hard we try—than to observe this diversity and come to
the immediate, obvious conclusion that one thing is not
another. If there is any difficulty in these decisions, it
proceeds entirely from the indeterminate meaning of words,
which is corrected by juster definitions. That the square on
the hypotenuse is equal to the squares of the other two sides
can’t be known without a train of reasoning and enquiry. But
to convince us that where there is no property there can be no
injustice it is only necessary to define the terms and explain
‘injustice’ to be ‘a violation of property’. This proposition
is indeed merely an imperfect definition. Similarly with

First Enquiry David Hume 12: The sceptical philosophy

all those purported reasonings that may be found in every
other branch of learning except the sciences of quantity and
number. The latter sciences, it’s safe to say, are the only
proper objects of knowledge and demonstration.

All other enquiries of men regard only matter of fact
and existence; and these obviously can’t be demonstrated.
Whatever is the case may not be the case. No negation
of a fact can involve a contradiction. The nonexistence of
any existing thing is as clear and distinct an idea as its
existence. The proposition which affirms it not to exist, even
if it is quite false, is just as conceivable and intelligible as
that which affirms it to exist. The case is different with
the sciences properly so called [Hume means: the mathematical
sciences]. Every mathematical proposition that isn’t true is
confused and unintelligible. That the cube root of 64 is equal
to the half of 10 is a false proposition and can never be
distinctly conceived. But that Caesar never existed may be
a false proposition but still it’s perfectly conceivable and
implies no contradiction.

It follows that the existence of any thing can only be
proved by arguments from its cause or its effect; and such
arguments are based entirely on experience. If we reason a
priori, anything may appear able to produce anything. The
falling of a pebble may, for all we know, extinguish the sun;
or the wish of a man may control the planets in their orbits.

Only experience teaches us the nature and limits of cause
and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object
from that of another.16

Such is the foundation of factual reasoning, which forms

the greater part of human knowledge and is the source of all
human action and behaviour.

Factual reasonings concern either particular or general
facts. Everyday practical thinking is concerned only with the
former, as is the whole of history, geography and astronomy.

The sciences that treat of general facts are politics, natu-
ral philosophy [= ‘physics’], physic [= ‘medicine’], chemistry, etc.
where the qualities, causes and effects of a whole species of
objects are investigated.

Divinity or theology proves the existence of a god and the
immortality of souls, so the reasonings that compose it partly
concern particular facts and partly general ones. In so far as
it is supported by experience, theology has a foundation in
reason, but its best and most solid foundation is faith and
divine revelation.

Morals and ·artistic· criticism are in the domain of taste
and feeling rather than of intellectual thought. Beauty,
whether moral or natural, is felt rather than perceived. If we
do reason about it and try to fix standards of judgment, we
must bring in facts that can be the objects of reasoning and
enquiry—e.g. facts about the general taste of mankind.

When we go through libraries, convinced of these princi-
ples, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any
volume—of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance—let
us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning about quantity
or number? No. Does it contain any experiential reasoning
about matters of fact and existence? No. Then throw it in
the fire, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

16That impious maxim of the ancient philosophy, Ex nihilo, nihil fit [From nothing, nothing is made], which was supposed to rule out the creation of matter,
ceases to be a secure axiom according to this philosophy. Not only might the will of the supreme being create matter; but for all we know a priori it might
be created by the will of any other being, or by any other cause that the most fanciful imagination can assign.

Philosophy

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