Second Meditation:
Even though there may be a deceiver of some
sort, very powerful and very tricky, who bends all his efforts to keep me
personally deceived, there can be no slightest doubt that I exist, since he
deceives me; and let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never make me
nothing as I think that I am something.[1]
Third
Meditation:
But when I considered something very simple and
very easy concerning arithmetic and geometry, as, for example, that two and
three joined together produce the number five, and other similar things, did I
not conceive of them at least sufficiently to guarantee that they were
true? Certainly, if I have since judged
that these things might be doubted, it was for no other reason that it occurred
to me that some God might perhaps have given me such a nature that I would be
mistaken even about those things that seemed most obvious to me. I am constrained to admit that it is easy for
him, if he wishes it, to bring it about that I am wrong even in those matters
which I believe I perceive with the mind’s eye with the greatest possible
obviousness. And on the other hand,
every time I turn to the things I think I conceive clearly, I am so convinced
by them that I am spontaneously led to proclaim: “Let him deceive me who can;
he will never be able to bring it about that I am nothing while I think I am
something, or, it being true that I now am, that it will some day be true that
I have never been, or that two and three joined together make more or less than
five, or similar things in which I recognize a manifest contradiction and which
I see clearly could not be otherwise than as I conceived them.”[2]
Descartes, Meditations (1641)
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