After proving to his own satisfaction the existence of the soul and of God, Descartes returns to the starting-point of his whole inquiry--that is, the reality of the material world and of its laws. And now his theology supplies him with a short and easy method for getting rid of the sceptical doubts that had troubled him at first. He has a clear and distinct idea of his own body and of other bodies surrounding it on all sides as extended substances communicating movements to one another. And he has a tendency to accept whatever is clearly and distinctly conceived by him as true. But to suppose that God created that tendency with the intention of deceiving him would argue a want of veracity in the divine nature incompatible with its {41} perfection. Such reasoning obviously ignores the alternative that God might be deceiving us for our good. Or rather what we call truth might not be an insight into the nature of things in themselves, but a correct judgment of antecedents and consequents. Our consciousness would then be a vast sensori-motor machinery adjusted to secure the maintenance and perfection of life. Descartes, as a mathematician, places the essence of Matter or Body in extension. Here he agrees with another mathematical philosopher, Plato, who says the same in his _Timæus_. So far the coincidence might be accidental; but when we find that the Frenchman, like the Greek, conceives his materialised space as being originally divided into triangular bodies, the evidence of unacknowledged borrowing seems irresistible--the more so that Huyghens mentions this as customary with Descartes. The great author of the _Method_ and the _Meditations_--for, after every critical deduction, his greatness as a thinker remains undoubted--contributed nothing to ethics. Here he is content to reaffirm the general conclusions of Greek philosophy, the necessary superiority of mind to matter, of the soul to the body, of spirit to sense. He accepts free-will from Aristotle without any attempt to reconcile it with the rigid determinism of his own mechanical naturalism. At the same time there is a remarkable anticipation of modern psychology in his doctrine of intellectual assent as an act of the will. When our judgments go beyond what is guaranteed by a clear and distinct perception of their truth there is a possibility of error, and then the error is our own fault, the precipitate conclusion having been a voluntary act. Thus human free-will intervenes to clear God of all {42} responsibility for our delusions as well as for our crimes. MALEBRANCHE.