  Descartes rejected both alternatives. He denied, along with many of his contemporaries, that there are eternal truths independent of the existence of God. But he also denied that the eternal truths are fixed in God's intellect. Some Neoplatonist philosophers held that the eternal truths in the human mind are copies, or ectypes, of the archetypes in the mind of God. Some Aristotelian philosophers just prior to Descartes, including Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), held that  the eternal truths reflect God's own understanding of his creative power; God's power includes that,  if he creates a rabbit, it must be an animal. Eternal truths are  latent in God's creative power, and he understands this, so that if human beings understand the eternal truths as eternal, they also do so by understanding the creative power of God (Hatfield 1993).