Treatment of Innate Ideas

This summary is important for the background that it lays the foundation for Descartes's discussion of the school principal. Descartes's approach appears to be to construct a philosophical edifice for the whole of rational screw, and for that enterprise to succeed, a sufficient intellectual/rational foundation has to be laid. Indeed, as a whole, the Meditations seem causeed at explaining the verity of human intuition, spot also accounting for the imperfections of such intuition. A second aim of the Meditations appears to be to account for faith in rational terms, and in this regard Descartes repeatedly makes reference to the role of God in determining, allowing, or qualifying the scope and limit of human cordial capacity, or to the question of God's very existence. As will be seen hereafter, Descartes appears to have in vi

Descartes acknowledges the plight that this poses for the seeker of clarity and understanding. First he nones that, as a practical matter, it makes more grit to doubt the reality of gumption experience, it being easily demonstrated that mavin cannot trust one's feels. moreover then he notes that, as a matter of fact, one is more inclined to trust the reality sense experience precisely because it is palpable and as it were ready to hand. Meanwhile, the supposedly simpler abstractions of the mind and imagination, which be as it were closer to one's most basic experience, "which are known to me and which pertain to my real nature" (10) are, as a practical matter, much more elusive to human understanding. In other words, it is more difficult for the mind to grasp an judgment of its own essence than to grasp an idea of phenomenal reality.

Descartes uses the test with the lump of wax to illustrate the point.

In part, the experiment deals with the slip of confluence between mind and sense experience, which can be extended to describe the confluence between the psychical and visible realms. But his purpose is really to account for the mind as the ultimate determinant of being, and especially the determinant of an understanding of sensate or phenomenological being. That is, the immediate perceptions of phenomenal reality may change, scarcely the understanding of that reality will in one sense remain constant (i.e., constantly understood), and in another sense may be refined (i.e., more perfectly understood).

Descartes sets the lumber for his discussion by approaching the very conception of the reality of mind through its opposite, doubt. Doubt, indeed, is according to Descartes the most fundamental or evident of human experiences: "All that up to the present period I have accepted as most uncoiled and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses; but it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive, and it is wiser not to trust entirely to any
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