Self-reflection focus on the beatific vision after death. The 13th century pope Innocent III wrote about the essential misery of earthly existence in his ""On the misery of the human condition"" – a view that was disputed by, for example, Giannozzo Manetti in his treatise ""On human dignity."" A famous quote of Shakespeare's Hamlet (II, ii, 115-117), expressing the contrast of human physical beauty, intellectual faculty, and ephemeral nature: René Descartes famously and succinctly proposed: "Cogito ergo sum" (French: ""Je pense donc je suis""; English: ""I think, therefore I am""). The Enlightenment was driven by a renewed conviction, that, in the
Cogito, ergo sum "Meditations", Descartes phrases the conclusion of the argument as "that the proposition, "I am, I exist," is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind." ("Meditation" II) At the beginning of the second meditation, having reached what he considers to be the ultimate level of doubt—his argument from the existence of a deceiving god—Descartes examines his beliefs to see if any have survived the doubt. In his belief in his own existence, he finds that it is impossible to doubt that he exists. Even if there were a deceiving god (or an evil demon),