Descartes originally asserted that there was only one thing which he could see as certain--his own existence. He later came to see that there were certain innate ideas in the mind, one of which was the idea of God. In his argument in the fifth Meditation, he stated that he could produce in his mind the idea of God just as he could the ideas of shape and number so that he should accord the idea of the existence of God the same certainty he accords mathematics. In the passage under discussion, Descartes states that because he cannot conceive of God except as existing, it follows that existence is inseparable from God. The existence of God is what determines this. Descartes is not free to think of God without existence, for existence is a supreme perfection and God is a supreme being. The mere fact that Descartes can conceive o
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