 Finally, Hume’s against the notion of necessary existence have obvious relevance also for Descartes’s effort, in Meditations III, to prove that God necessarily exists by way of reasoning from our (innate) idea of God. Since a priori any thing may cause any thing, it follows that even if we had an idea of a perfect being there would be no basis for the claim that God must be the source of this idea. Similarly, since we have no (abstract) idea of existence, distinct from the conception of particular objects, there is no basis for claiming, as does Descartes in Meditations V, that the idea of God implies his actual existence. Whatever idea of God we are able to frame is an idea of something that we can conceive of as either existing or not existing. Existence is not some further quality or “perfection” which a being possesses along with its other attributes. There is, therefore, no contradiction involved in denying that God exists.