Frog asked:

In Descartes 'Fourth Meditation' is he saying that both human will and human intellect are perfect,
even though intellect is limited?

============

I agree, there does, on the face of it, seem to be a contradiction here, however, I believe this is
brought about by the rather haphazard way in which the meditation is being pursued; where
Descartes flits easily between discussing the perfection of God and his own limited understanding. In
this meditation the movement is from mind to God, and from God to things. In the 'Third Meditation'
God has been established as the wholly perfect being and the source of all perfection. Since he is
also all powerful, this naturally raises the question of the existence of evil, discussed here in the
shape of one aspect of evil, namely error.Within the ethical discussion contained in THE 'Fourth
Meditation' Descartes discloses the basic elements of his psychological theory, and again reveals his
reliance upon the doctrine of the supremacy of the will.

Since the function of the intellect is to receive ideas, innate and adventitious, it is passive in
knowledge, and so an active principle is required in the mind to activate the judgment to form
factitious ideas. Furthermore, if the mind were wholly passive in relation to God, then the existence of
evil must entail some limitations upon either God's perfect goodness, or upon his absolute power, or
upon both. Since this is inconceivable, it follows that there must be some independent activating
principle in the mind of each human being. This principle is the will.

Descartes, then, concedes that his errors alone argue imperfection in him, he observes that they
depend on two concurrent causes; on his faculty of cognition, and his faculty of choice or free will,
that is, on the intellect and at the same time on the will. The intellect, he claims, does no more than
perceive the ideas that are matter for judgment, and precisely so regarded contains no error. He
understands that there may be many things of which he has no idea, but he does not consider that he
is deprived of this extended knowledge, he can put forward no reason to show that God ought to have
given him a greater power of knowledge than he did; he seems to harbour a notion that no one
should be given allthe perfections, but that they should be shared out. This might lead to the
implication that shared out knowledge provides the diversity of talent and ability found in the human
race.

I may be wrong, but I understand your question to be aimed at this idea of limitation of afforded
knowledge to the intellect. The human intellect is perfect within the bounds set by God, but
knowledge itself is limited to each individual, which ostensibly limits the perfect intellect in what it can
achieve. If I wished to take it further I could tentatively suggest that adding together all the members
of the human race we would have made manifest the whole perfect intellect gifted by God to
humanity.

With regard to the will, Descartes believes that it is neither restricted or imperfect, hence there is
unrestricted freedom of human volition, he is "aware of no bounds upon its scope. Nothing else in me
is so perfect or so great but that I understand the possibility of something still more perfect, still
greater" (Meditation 1V, Descartes Philosophical Writings, Nelson). He concludes that it is in this
regard above all that he bears the image of God.

John Brandon