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PRINCIPLES OF THE SYSTEM. 93 than myself, can have only come from someone who is more perfect in reality than I. Since I know that the infinite con- tains more reality than the finite, I may conclude that the idea of the infinite has not been derived from the idea of the finite by abstraction and negation ; it precedes the latter, and I become conscious of my defects and my fini- tude only by comparison with the absolute perfection of God. This idea, then, must have been implanted in me by God himself. The idea of God is an original endow- ment ; it is as innate as the idea of myself. However incomplete it may be, it is still sufficient to give a knowl- edge of God's existence, although not a perfect compre- hension of his being, just as a man may skirt a mountain without encircling it. Descartes brings in the idea of God in order to escape solipsism. So long as the self-consciousness of the ego re- mained the only certainty, there was no conclusive basis for the assumption that anything exists beyond self, that the ideas which apparently come from without are really occasioned by external things and do not spring from the mind itself. For our natural instinct to refer them to objects without us might well be deceptive. It is only through the idea of God, and by help of the principle that the cause must contain at least as much reality as the effect, that I am taken beyond myself and assured that I am not the only thing in the world. For as this idea con- tains more of representative, than I of actual reality, I cannot have been its cause. To this empirical argument, which derives God's exist- ence from our idea of God (from the fact that we have an idea of him), Descartes joins the (modified) ontological ar- gument of Anselm, which deduces the existence of God from the concept of God. While the ideas of all other things include only the possibility of existence, necessary existence is inseparable from the concept of the most perfect being. God cannot be thought apart from existence ; he has the ground of his existence in himself ; he is ^ se or causa sui. Finally, Descartes adds a third argument. The idea of perfections which I do not possess can only have been imparted to me by a more perfect being than I, which >