The name derives from the fact that the idea of God existing in each person "is the trademark, hallmark or stamp of their divine creator".
He says, "it is no surprise that God, in creating me, should have placed this idea in me to be, as it were, the mark of the craftsman stamped on his work."
Commenting on this passage Williams says, "This is a piece of scholastic metaphysics, and it is one of the most striking indications of the historical gap that exists between Descartes' thought and our own, despite the modern reality of much else that he writes, that he can unblinkingly accept this unintuitive and barely comprehensible principle as self-evident in the light of reason.
"[3]: 120 In his own time, it was challenged by Hobbes who in the Objections says, "Moreover, M. Descartes should consider afresh what 'more reality' means.
"[6] In this scheme, a substance (e.g. a mind) will have an attribute (thought) and the mode might be willing or having an idea.
[5]: 158 The degree of reality is related to the way in which something is dependent—"Modes are logically dependent on substance; they 'inhere in it as subject.'...
Descartes says, The nature of an idea is such that of itself it requires no formal reality except what it derives from my thought, of which it is a mode.
For although this cause does not transfer any of its actual or formal reality to my idea, it should not on that account be supposed that it must be less real."
"[10]: 100 Williams comments that "Descartes took these hopeless arguments for the existence of God to be self-evidently valid, conditioned in this by historical and perhaps also by temperamental factors.
Williams points out, "God, as the argument insists, has more reality or perfection than anything else whatever.
"[3]: 128 Then there is the problem of how it can be possible for a finite mind to have a clear and distinct idea of an infinite God.
"[4]: 81 Cottingham argues that making this distinction is "an unsatisfactory line of defence".
[11]: 198 He adds, "But clearly such inferences will hold only if the man has a quite determinate idea of the machine.
If a man comes up and says that he has an idea of a marvellous machine which will feed the hungry by making proteins out of sand, I shall be impressed neither by his experience nor by his powers of invention if it turns out that that is all there is to the idea, and he has no conception, or only the haziest conception, of how such a machine might work.
In the second set of replies Descartes says this is the fault of the reader: I do not see what I can add to make it any clearer that the idea in question could not be present to my mind unless a supreme being existed.
I can only say that it depends on the reader: if he attends carefully to what I have written he should be able to free himself from the preconceived opinions which may be eclipsing his natural light, and to accustom himself to believing in the primary notions, which are as evident and true as anything can be, in preference to opinions which are obscure and false, albeit fixed in the mind by long habit… I cannot force this truth on my readers if they are lazy, since it depends solely on their exercising their own powers of thought.