  At every stage of Descartes’s argument in the Meditations, there are ontological implications: the mind’s independence of sensory perceptions (perceptions whose reliability is ultimately upset by the possibility that he is dreaming), the literally unimaginable sort of thing that a physical object such as a piece of wax must be, the existence of a veracious God, who provides a guarantee for the reliability of reason, and finally the existence of a physical world consisting of extended things. Arnauld immediately suggested to Descartes that his argument contained a circle: we can rely on reason only if we know that God exists, but we know that God exists only by relying on reason. Thus, Descartes has established the certainty only of his own existence, but nothing beyond that. Descartes thought that he had a response to this criticism, but whether he did, and how cogent it is as a rebuttal, have been perennial questions of debate among Descartes scholars. One way to understand Descartes’s procedure is that while he does not claim to prove even that he exists, he does claim to show that it is unreasonable to think otherwise. That is, he shows that the argument of the skeptic fails because the consistent application of reason leads to the view not that reason is unreliable, but precisely the opposite. The skeptic might be right, but he is unreasonable. A parallel case in the moral realm might be brought out here. Over the course of an exchange with Mesland about the nature of human freedom, Descartes notes that we can, absolutely speaking, act against against our reason and judgment. However, morally speaking, we cannot (CSM III 245/AT 4:173). When explaining what he means by this, Descartes suggests that we can only act against our better judgment and reason in the case where we take it to be a good thing to demonstrate our freedom by doing so. This is what Kenny has called the “freedom of perversity” (Kenny 1998). In other words, only with the attitude of perversion can we act against what we take to be best. So, as in the epistemological realm, so too in the moral realm: it is unreasonable or even perverse to deny the results of the consistent use of reason. Descartes thus emerges at least as a bootstrap rationalist—using innate reason and a disinclination to perversity to assert the truth of his own existence, which, in turn, serves as a foundation for a more extensive search after truth—in a way that mirrors the non-absolute status of his necessary truths. The rationalist connection between the orders of being and knowing is thus preserved.