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In ³Meditations on First Philosophy´ Descartes puts all of our sources of knowledge into

doubt then rebuilds our trust in what we know from the ground up. In the process of reaffirming

all of what we know the last thing he admits is the existence of material objects. In this paper I

will explain what for Descartes counts as knowledge, how he says we make errors, and how

these accounts can be used to strengthen his argument for the existence of corporeal objects.

Finally I will show how this additional proof is convincing enough that we may dispel any

remaining doubts about the existence of material objects.

It¶s in his Fourth Meditation that Descartes describes how it is that we make errors. By

the time we reach this point in the Meditations we knows undoubtedly that we exist as thinking

things, the nature of corporeal bodies is extension, and since we are finite, yet we exist with an

idea of God as infinite, God exists by way of the causal principle. We know that the nature of

God is infinite perfection, and part of that nature is infinite benevolence. It is clear that God

cannot be the source of our errors because if he had given us any faculty that causes us to go

wrong that would make him a deceiver. Although God has enough power that he could deceive

me the will to do so would be malicious and would go against his benevolent nature. From this

we have a divine guarantee that God ³surely did not give [us] the kind of faculty that would ever

enable [us] to go wrong while using it correctly´ (AT 54: p. 38). Descartes says that we make

errors because of two contemporaneous causes, the will and the intellect.

Neither of these two faculties considered alone are faulty. It¶s clear that we can

trust what we know from the intellect, since it has been given to me by God, and that which I

know clearly and distinctly cannot be denied on pain of contradiction. Even though the

knowledge I gain through the intellect is correct it can¶t be said that our intellects are infinite.
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Our minds do not contain all ideas. God did not create us with a faulty faculty of knowledge, nor

did he give us all of the knowledge the universe has to offer. While the intellect is limited

Descartes says on the other hand that ³it is only the will, or freedom of choice, which I

experience within me to be so great that the idea of any greater faculty is beyond my grasp´ (AT

57: 40). The faculty to affirm or deny which God has given us is infinite and perfect. Whenever

we move to affirm or deny something there is no external force that determines my decision.

There is no limit on what we can make judgments on. Given that the will is perfect and

something perfect considered by itself couldn¶t cause us to err it can¶t be that the will is the

source of our mistakes.

Instead of from the individual faculties themselves Descartes sites the source of our

mistakes in the way we at times misuse them. The scope of the will is much greater than that of

the intellect. It¶s when we choose to make judgments on things before the intellect gets the

chance to examine them that we make mistakes. In order to avoid errors we cannot extend the

will beyond things that we clearly and distinctly perceive. The analogy of the men in coats,

which Descartes mentions in the Second Meditation, shows how we extend the will beyond what

the intellect can grasp. When he looks across the courtyard he normally thinks he has seen the

men themselves. However since he has only seen the coats and hats and not the men he has only

judged that he has seen men. For Descartes the fact that he has seen men doesn¶t count as

knowledge because it is only grasped by the faculty of judgment. For Descartes in order for our

perceptions to be considered knowledge need both undeniable certainty and a divine guarantee

that what we clearly perceive is true. By improperly using the will we often confirm things we

don¶t fully understand, since the will is indifferent to whether or not what it¶s deciding on is fully

understood.
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Before I can show how this explanation for how we err supports Descartes¶ argument for

the existence of material objects I must first explain the later argument. In the Sixth Meditation

Descartes begins his argument for the existence of corporeal bodied by considering that the

faculty of sense perception is passive. The sense perceptions we have come to us without our

cooperation. We cannot will ourselves to see a tree or smell some delicious food. We can

imagine what it would be like to have those perceptions, which would require some volition on

our part, but these would be blatantly different from actually having them. Since these ideas do

not require any intellectual act from us they¶re source must be from something outside of us. We

know from the Third Meditation that the source of any idea we have must have at least as much

formal reality as the amount of objective reality the idea has. This means that the source of our

sense perceptions can either be God, some creature more perfect than us but less than God, or

something that resembles our perceptions. If the source was God or God working through some

intermediary being then it would seem that he was deceiving us. He has given us a great

propensity to believe our sense perceptions come from material objects, and he has given us no

faculty to recognize him as the source. Since God is not a deceiver we can rule him out as well as

any intermediary substance. The only possibility we are left with is corporeal bodies themselves.

Therefore they must exist. This also has implications in that it means that our sense perceptions

are trustworthy insofar as they tell us that material objects exist.

Although we know that material objects exist we have no guarantee that they resemble

our perceptions of them. It¶s still not possible to trust the ideas we perceive through the senses

the same way we do clear and distinct ideas with the intellect. Material bodies may not possess

all of the qualities our senses tell us they have since the ideas we have from our senses are often

unclear and confused. However we can be certain that they do contain all of the properties we
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understand about them clearly and distinctly through mathematics since that has been proved in

previous meditations. This distinction shows that sense perception has a separate purpose from

that of the intellect. Our senses are not meant to bring us knowledge but only to keep us from

harm. In Descartes¶s words, ³the proper purpose of the sensory perceptions given me by nature is

simply to inform the mind of the what is beneficial or harmful for the composite of which the

mind is a part´ (AT 83; p.57). The things we know about corporeal bodies are obscure compared

to what we know by the natural light, but they are sufficient for protecting the body.

Since we know the role of our sense perception we can now see how Descartes¶s

argument for the existence of material things fits with his explanation for how we make errors. If

we use our sense perception the way it was meant to be used, then it is impossible that we should

go wrong. The errors we make concerning material objects only happen when we affirm what we

know from the senses as though it were grasped by the intellect. It is again through a faulty

volition that we extend the will to affirm something the intellect has not fully grasped. This

explanation maintains the divine guarantee that our clear and distinct perceptions are true

because it does not label God as a deceiver. Material objects exist without our faculty of sense

perception being faulty, since only certain judgments are meant to be made using it. God has still

not given us any faulty faculties so we can still trust that everything Descartes has proved in the

meditations up to this point is correct.

This additional proof for the existence of corporeal bodies is enough convincing evidence

for us to undo the remaining doubts we have about them. When we arrived at the Sixth

Meditation the only thing standing between us and the existence of material objects is the

possibility that everything we¶ve ever experienced has all just been a dream. Up to that point

everything we have become certain of could all very well just be internal to us. Neither our
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thinking nature, God¶s existence, nor the mathematically understood nature of corporeal bodies

require material objects to exist externally. Now that we understand more about the way we are

meant to use the senses there is a way to tell that we are not dreaming. In order to use our senses

for protections against the harmful things we need to develop a relationship with causal

regularity. By a relationship with causal regularity I mean that we need to understand what sorts

of things are going to be painful as well as the contexts they are most often found in. This

requires use of the memory so we can remember the nature of the things that have harmed us in

the past. We have to learn that when we touch the stove it hurts, and when a rock is thrown at us

we should duck. Using this relationship with causal regularity we can clearly distinguish between

when we are dreaming and when we are awake. This is because, ³dreams are never linked by

memory with all the other actions of life as waking experiences are´ (AT 89; 61). Things that

happen in our dreams do not fit with causal regularity. Descartes uses the example of how in our

dreams people seem to come and go mysteriously. They appear and disappear without us having

any perception of where they came from. We wouldn¶t readily accept it if this sort of thing

happened in real life. There are countless other examples of how our dreams are noticeably

different from reality such as how we seem to inexplicably find ourselves in different places, or

how a familiar setting may be outlandishly rearranged into a vastly improbable configuration.

Put simply effect does not follow cause in our dreams the same way it does in reality. We can

now do away with the possibility that we are dreaming since our relationship with causal reality,

which has been established by our senses and memory working together, allows us to clearly

distinguish between when we are dreaming and when we are not. Given that the dreaming doubt

was the last remaining doubt it should be no problem to admit the existence of corporeal bodies.c