order to think it is
necessary to exist,--I concluded that I might take, as a general rule,
the principle that all the things which we very clearly and distinctly
conceive are true; only observing however that there is some difficulty
in rightly determining the objects which we distinctly conceive.

In the next place, from reflecting on the circumstance that I doubted,
and that consequently my being was not wholly perfect (for I clearly saw
that it was a greater perfection to know than to doubt), I was led to
inquire whence I had learned to think of something more perfect than
myself; and I clearly recognized that I must hold this notion from some
Nature which in reality was more perfect. As for the thoughts of many
other objects external to me, as of the sky, the earth, light, heat, and
a thousand more, I was less at a loss to know whence these came; for
since I remarked in them nothing which seemed to render them superior to
myself, I could believe that if these were true, they were dependences
on my own nature in so far as it possessed a certain perfection; and if
they were false, that I held them from nothing,--that is to say, that
they were in me because of a certain imperfection of my nature. But this
could not be the case with the idea of a Nature more perfect than
myself: for to receive it from nothing was a thing manifestly
impossible; and because it is not less repugnant that the more perfect
should be an effect of and dependence on the less perfect, than that
something should proceed from nothing, it was equally impossible that I
could hold it from myself: accordingly it but remained that it had been
placed in me by a Nature which was in reality more perfect than mine,
and which even possessed within itself all the perfections of which I
could form any idea,--that is to say, in a single word, which was
God....

I was disposed straightway to search for other truths; and when I had
represented to myself the object of the geometers, which I conceived to
be a continuous body, or a space indefinitely extended in length,
breadth, and height or depth, divisible into divers parts which admit of
different figures and sizes, and of being moved or transposed in all
manner of ways (for all this the geometers suppose to be in the object
they contemplate), I went over some of their simplest demonstrations.
And in the first place, I observed that the great certitude which by
common consent is accorded to these demonstratio