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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
CLEAR AND DISTINCT PERCEPTION – TRUTH (AT VII:34–6)
I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses. I will eliminate from my thoughts all images of bodily things, or rather, since this is hardly possible, I will regard all such images as vacuous, false and worthless. I will converse with myself and scrutinize myself a little more deeply; and in this way I will attempt to achieve, little by little, a more intimate knowledge of myself.
(vii:34)The Meditator continues with his experiment in Hyperbolic Doubt, maintaining the fiction of the malevolent Demon. When we left him at the end of Meditation Two, his belief-set was as it is represented in Figure 16. The Meditator reasons that he can add a new, significant item to his belief-set. He now “knows what is required for being certain of anything.” He is in a position, he finds, to lay down a general rule that will serve as the sought-for filter that can separate true from false. The filter is the test or criterion of the clarity and distinctness of his perceptions. Justifying, or certifying, this filter as “performing as advertised” takes up, as one might expect, the entirety of Meditation Three.
I am certain that I am a thinking thing … In this first item of knowledge there is simply a clear and distinct perception of what I am asserting; this would not be enough to make me certain of the truth of the matter if it could ever turn out that something which I perceived with such clarity and distinctness was false.[…]
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