172 DESCARTES' DISCOURSE ON METHOD TV 



no adamant. As the record of his progress tells 

 us, he was obliged to confess that life is full of 

 delusions; that authority may err ; that testimony 

 may be false or mistaken ; that reason lands us in 

 endless fallacies; that memory is often as little 

 trustworthy as hope ; that the evidence of the very 

 senses may be misunderstood ; that dreams are 

 real as long as they last, and that what we call 

 reality may be a long and restless dream. Nay, it 

 is conceivable that some powerful and malicious 

 being may find his pleasure in deluding us, and 

 in making us believe the thing which is not, every 

 moment of our lives. What, then, is certain ? 

 What even, if such a being exists, is beyond the 

 reach of his powers of delusion ? Why, the fact 

 that the thought, the present consciousness, exists. 

 Our thoughts may be delusive, but they cannot be 

 fictitious. As thoughts, they are real and existent, 

 and the cleverest deceiver cannot make them 

 otherwise. 



Thus, thought is existence. More than that, so 

 far as we are concerned, existence is thought, all 

 our conceptions of existence being some kind or 

 other of thought. Do not for a moment suppose 

 that these are mere paradoxes or subtleties. A 

 little reflection upon the commonest facts proves 

 them to be irrefragable truths. For example, I 

 take up a marble, and I find it to be a red, round, 

 hard, single body. We call the redness, tin: 

 roundness, the hardness, and the singleness, 



