 Descartes is committed to the view that virtue is sufficient for happiness, that is, a “perfect contentment of mind and inner satisfaction.” At the same time, he denies that virtue has value only as a means to happiness. On the contrary, virtue is grounded in the one aspect of human nature that is of unconditional value: the exercise of our free will, the perfection of the soul that “renders us in a certain way like God by making us masters of ourselves” (art. 152; CSM I 384).