etty hopeless when it comes to perfection, it couldnt be us, so God must be the cause of our idea of his perfection. He writes that, " the more perfectcannot be a consequence ofthe less perfect." The very idea of perfection implies existence, so to speak of a non-existent perfection is to engage in contradiction. For Descartes, God seems to fall into the realm of a Platonic form of God, an apriori existence. From his own existence, Descartes "proved" Gods existence and it was also in this way that Descartes proved that his external world existed. This brings us back to the mind-body problem. Having said the mind and the body were separate, Descartes then had to explain how they worked together in seemingly perfect unison. His theory began with one absolute substance, God, and two relative substances, mind and matter. Man, then, partakes of the two relative substances of which all else in the universe is made. Man is of the universe, for Descartes. As part of nature, he is mechanical to the extreme; he is a machine which operates by natural laws just as a watch might operate. These determinist ideas were to have a long influence and were propagated along with a similar dualism in the philosophy of Leibniz. Leibniz was probably the supreme intellect of his age, writing on many subjects, as well as inventing the differential calculus. Most of what he published while alive was similar to Descartes in its content in that it was limited to what the Royalty and those in charge wanted to believe. In public Leibniz propounded the "principle of the best", which among other things, argued that God has created the best possible world. Leibniz believed that finite substances, things like you and I, are composed of simples. He called these simples monads. The word monad comes from the Greek for unity which reflects the harmony he saw in the monad. He used an argument based on composition to argue for monads. He said that a substance is either a compo...
