PREFACE

—believe they should embark upon it. Since I had requested in that work that anyone who found anything in my writings worthy of criticism should deign to point it out to me, no objections worthy of note were raised against what I touched upon regarding these questions, except for two. I will respond to these briefly here before I begin a more precise explanation of these same matters.

The first objection is this: from the fact that the human mind, when reflecting on itself, perceives itself to be nothing other than a thinking thing original: "res cogitans"; a core Cartesian concept of the mind as a substance whose whole essence is to think, it does not follow that its nature or essence original: "essentia" consists only in being a thinking thing—in a way that the word only would exclude all other things that might perhaps also be said to belong to the nature of the soul.

To this objection, I respond that even then I did not intend to exclude those other things in relation to the actual truth of the matter (which I was not dealing with at the time), but only in relation to my own perception. My meaning was that I knew absolutely nothing that I could recognize as belonging to my essence, except that I was a thinking thing, or a thing possessing the faculty of thinking. In the following sections, however...