 When we construct arguments on the basis of basic a priori principles of metaphysics – what Descartes calls “primary notions” (Second Replies, AT 7:145–46, CSM 2:104; Principles I.50, AT 8A:23–24, CSM 1:209) – and not the non a priori premises that constitute much of the early thinking of Descartes’ meditator, we recognize that God is a necessary existent who cannot deceive and also that He is the independent and supreme creator of all reality, both possible and actual (“To [Mesland], 2 May 1644,” AT 4:118–19, CSMK 235; “To [Mersenne], 27 May 1630,” AT 1:152, CSMK 25; Third Meditation, AT 7:45, CSM 2:31). If so, we know on a priori grounds that the possibilities introduced in the First Meditation are fictional and indeed are not possibilities at all. It turns out, upon reflection, that God did not create them. This is not just to say that the possibilities exist but do not obtain. To say that a possibility exists but does not obtain would be to say that it exists as a possibility that is not actualized; it would be to say that in addition to actual reality there also exists possible reality and that some possible reality is never actualized. If in Descartes’s system God created only actual reality and not in addition any possible reality, then possibilities themselves are not real – they have no ontological status and so are not in fact possibilities, because they are not anything. God did not create the possibility that we exist with minds that might be certain of things that are false; He did not create the possibility that we evolved from chance; He did not create the possibility of an evil demon. None of these possibilities exists automatically, and they do not exist just because the cognitive deliverances of the First Meditation meditator tell us that they do. When we (or the meditator) postulated their existence in the First Meditation, we were being hasty, and all that we had to go on at that early stage of inquiry was our confused pre-Meditations conceptions.