ve prevented him from g Connecting Learning and Program Design oing down the route of understanding all sensory experience, including the manifestations of our sleep, to be illusional. In his reply, Descartes re-emphasises the need to suspend judgement in order to view things in a clear and distinct way, the proposition that everything one has hitherto believed is false is in itself a false statement. He argued that ‘pretending’ to doubt things under the guise of purse falsehood was necessary to contribute towards bringing the truth to light, likening it to astronomers imagining the equator or w Connecting Learning and Program Design here mathematicians add new lines to given geometric figures[4]. In the First Meditation, he indicates that the mind is categorically distinctive in the world, therefore even during periods of inactivity (such as being asleep or comatose) the mind still exists. The mind has the capacity to internally reflect and evaluate opinions with the aid of reason, it isn’t however enough to merely notice recurrent habitual opinions, one must actively meditate in order to reconsider and reassemble them in a logical manner.  Connecting Learning and Program Design To pretend for a short time that these former opinions are ‘utterly false and imaginary’[5] is to over time counterbalance preconceived opinion with a clear, distinct perspective. This could be viewed as a prudent attempt to reconcile the foundations of his methodology, noting that there can be no erroneous consequences for ‘carping’[6]. When Descartes refers to the method of universal doubt, he meant a method that begins with consideration of grounds for radical sceptical doubt, as such is the purpose of the Meditations to describe a general method for investigating many sorts of truths: the mathematical, the physical and the metaphysical[7]. Instead of telling us to test each of our beliefs through a method of radically denying each of them, he is exhorting us to reject ‘merely probably cognition’[8] He concluded that doubtful enquiry shrouded in this way perfectly complemented philosophical openness, the pursuit of knowledge and the love of truth. As a devout Catholic, Descartes’ enquiry naturally arrived to questioning the existence of God. Although not traditionally a dualist, he made a distinction between the human mind and bod Connecting Learning and Program Design y, two creative substances which are to be accepted as the bedrock of reality and human mechanics. Whilst the body, anything that occupies space, is understood through its principal attribute of extension (e.g. knowing what a toe is because you are ab Connecting Learning and Program Design le to extend yours); the mind is understood through its capacity to think, knowing for example what  Connecting Learning and Program Design emotions such as anger, sorrow and happiness are. Where there are arguments that suggest they can interact with one another (t>