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<blockquote>“But no sooner had I completed the whole course of study that normally takes one straight into the ranks of the ‘learned’ than I completely changed my mind about what this education could do for me. For I found myself tangled in so many doubts and errors that I came to think that my attempts to become educated had done me no good except to give me a steadily widening view of my ignorance!”</blockquote>
Descartes concluded that if his goal was to attain certain knowledge about the world,the accepted methodology for doing so must be rejected, and a new one would be required. Methodology held a central place in his epistemology; in fact, one of Descartes’ criticisms of Galileo was that he failed to produce a fully developed methodology to justify his discoveries, and had simply explained particular physical phenomena.[[CiteRef::Ariew (1986)]] Rather than experience and intuition, Descartes ' '''methodological skepticism''' was based on reason and on the capacity to doubt. The harder a proposition was to doubt, the greater its certainty. This was an epistemological innovation.
His strategy was, first, to reject all knowledge that he cannot be certain of, and accept only those propositions of which he is certain. He would deduce other knowledge from such axioms using reason. By this method Descartes hoped to produce a kind of systematized knowledge that could be universally accepted. In his 'Meditations on First Philosophy', [[CiteRef::Descartes (2004)]] Descartes identified the sole indubitable proposition upon which he would build his entire philosophical system: he was certain of his own existence as a thinking being, or in latin, '''‘Cogito, Ergo Sum’''' (also styled ‘Dubito, Ergo Cogito, Ergo Sum’ or simply as ‘the Cogito’); “I think, therefore I am.” From the foundation of his own existence, Descartes deduced that he must be a created being, that this requires a creator, that creator being God, the benevolent nature of God, and the consequent reliability of his senses and of the God-given ability of his reason to form clear and distinct ideas. It was therefore possible to use his senses and reason to gain knowledge of an external world. This reasoning formed the foundation of his systematized scientific worldview.[[CiteRef::Newman (2014)]]