 If Descartes holds that potential being is strictly speaking nothing, and if his ontology and his commitment to divine immutability, divine preordination, and (his particular conception of) omnipotence bar possibilities from his system, it is not exactly clear what to make of the possibility of mind and body existing in separation. One view is that Descartes is committed to the reality of this possibility and that, with his commitment to other possibilities, this commitment is part of a pattern of Descartes’ helping himself to entities that his system does not allow. That is, it might be the case that Descartes wants his system to be rich enough to posit possibilities and that, when it isn’t, he posits them anyway. Or, it might be the case that because the Meditations does not attempt to analyze (and then refine) the meditator’s pre-Meditations view of modality, the ‘can’ in Descartes’ claim that mind and body can exist apart is the not fully analyzed ‘can’ of the  vernacular.[45]