  One can see the concept of innateness at work behind the scenes in Descartes’ wax argument, but that passage is designed more to rid us of the idea that our deepest understanding of things comes from the senses than to defend innateness. It is in working out the implications of the wax discussion that we arrive at an innate abstract concept of spatial extension. Innateness is also at work, but again behind the scenes, in the central argument of the Meditations that takes us from the fact that we have an idea of God to the existence of God outside the mind. This (innate) idea of an infinite being (God’s ‘signature’ in us his creatures, as Descartes has it) is what makes it possible for us to know that there is a world beyond our thoughts and that our thoughts are not systematically mistaken. But in the discussion in Meditation III, Descartes again does not feature the concept of innateness – when and how we’ve come by our idea of God is less to the point than that we have it and could not have constructed it from our thoughts about our own mind. What’s more, that argument takes as a given a causal principle to the effect that the cause of an idea must have at least as great a ‘degree of formal reality’ (read: reality) as the ‘objective reality’ (read: the degree of reality of the object/content) of the idea.  The principle is arcane, and it’s hard to imagine how Descartes could have explained its availability to the Meditator except by claiming that it rests on a clear and distinct insight into the nature of causality, which would presumably have to be given innately.  In both these arguments, as in most of his main works, Descartes does not address the concept of innateness head-on (the outburst in his Notes Directed Against a Certain Program, which includes a defense of the radical view that all our ideas are innate, is the most notable exception). Part of the problem might be that it is not easy to integrate the claim that there are innate ideas or principles with Descartes’ identification of mind and consciousness. What is innate is in the mind prior to experience. He suggests at one point that ideas may be in the mind innately in the way that gout may run in a family. To the extent that this is read as a propensity theory, it will come in for heavy criticism in the Empiricist attack on innateness.