At first sight this passage appears to be so clearly in contradiction to the one in the third Meditation that, as we have said, it is scarcely possible to avoid the supposition that Descartes had meantime rejected his thesis as to the three fundamental classes of psychical phenomena, so shunning Scylla only to plunge into Charybdis; avoiding the old mistake of confusing the judgment with the idea (Vorstellung), he would now seem to confound it with the will. But a more attentive examination of all the circumstances will suffice to exonerate Descartes from such a charge, and this on the following grounds: (1) There is not the slightest sign that Descartes was ever conscious of having become untrue to the view expressed in the Meditations. (2) Further, in the year 1647 (three years after the publication of the Meditations and shortly before writing the Notae to his Programma) the Meditations appeared in a translation revised by Descartes himself, where, remarkably enough, not the slightest alteration is to be found in the decisive passage in the third Meditation. “Entre mes pensées,” it reads, “quelques unes sont commes les images des choses, et c’est à celles-là scules que convient proprement le nom d’idée.... D’autres, outre cela ont quelques autres formes; ... et de ce genre de pensées _les unes sont appelées volontés ou affections, et les autres jugements_.” (3) In the _Principles_ itself he says directly after (i. No. 42) that all our errors depend upon our will (a voluntate pendere); but so far is he from regarding the “error” as an act of volition, that he says there is no one who errs voluntarily (nemo est qui velit falli). Still clearer is it that he does not regard the judgment like the desires and dislikes as inner activities of the will itself, but only as a product of the will, since he at once adds: sed longe aliud est velle falli quam velle assentiri iis, in quibus contingit errorem reperiri,” etc. He does not say of the will that it desires, affirms, assents, but that it wills the assent; so also, not that it _is_ true but that it desires the truth (veritatis assequendae cupiditas ... _efficit_, ut ... judicium ferant).