The meditator finds herself classifying ideas in this section of the Third Meditation. Seeing that judgments are the only type of idea open to falsity, she considers the arguments behind her current "Resemblance Theory" which states that the judgments she makes are based on actual objects outside of herself. Her first reason behind holding to the resemblance theory is that nature taught her to thing this. This idea is explicitly defined as it is states "When I say 'Nature taught me to think this', all I mean is that a spontaneous impulse leads me to believe it, not that its truth has been revealed to me by some natural light." Taking nature first, what is meant is that as Hatfield states "we experience objects as having various properties". It is simply the idea that sensory perceptions present objects as they are outside of you. Nature teaching is to say that sensations are true representations of the world outside of the self. The meditator dismisses this as valid reasoning however as natural impulses have been wrong in the past and thus cannot be trustworthy at present.
When defining nature as teacher the meditator distinguishes it from the idea of natural light. She uses the cogito reasoning as an example of knowledge from natural light. She then goes on to explain that ideas from natural light cannot be doubted. Afterall, she maintains, "there cannot be another faculty both as trustworthy as the natural light and also capable of showing me that such things are not true." It seems, as Hatfield suggests, that the natural light may be another form of clear and distinct perception. However, it adds something to the equation in the idea as Hatfield notes that it is "all we have somehow makes it uninpeachable as a source of truth".
After consideration it seems that ideas that come to us clearly and distinctly seem to come from natural light, whereas ideas that come to us from the sensations and appear to be outside of us are things which nature has taught us. Furthermore, the former cannot be brought into doubt, while the latter can easily be doubted.
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I agree with your point that clear and distinct ideas come from the natural light and that the two are not the same thing. Given the meditator's discussion of the natural light as unique and supreme, and also the plausibility of the cogito arising from the natural light (and implausibility of it arising from clarity and distinctness) this seems right.
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