ABSTRACT
In his progress back from the Doubt Descartes encounters and relies on a number of propositions which, at least at the time of encountering them, strike him with such overwhelming force of conviction that – in the phrase we have already encountered – he ‘cannot but assent’ to them. These are propositions which he is prepared at the time to say that he ‘clearly and distinctly perceives to be true’: for instance, in the cogito, that he is thinking, and that it is impossible to think without existing; in the proofs of God, that he has an idea of God, and that a cause must have a reality adequate to its effect. In his eventual proof of the external world, he will rely on others. Among them is the crucial proposition that God is no deceiver. If the Doubt is genuinely defeated, and the possibility of the malicious demon finally banished, to be replaced by the assurance of a benevolent God, so that ordinary methods of enquiry, critically employed, are vindicated, then these various propositions must actually be true. Can Descartes claim that?
