not to imagine … that he is clothed with a human body … under colour that that figure was the most perfect of any; so neither ought we to imagine that the Spirit of God has human ideas, or bears any resemblance to our Spirit, under colour that we know nothing more perfect than the human mind. We ought rather to believe that as he comprehends the perfection of Matter, without being material, … so he comprehends also the perfections of created spirits without being Spirit, in the manner we conceive Spirit. That his true name is, He that is, or, in other words, Being without restriction, All Being, the Being Infinite and Universal.”[1] Still we have a positive Idea of God. It is the most positive of all. It is implied logically in every idea that we form, so that as God himself is the being of all existence, the background and cause of all things that are, the reality of all appearance, so the Idea of God is the central truth, as it were, of all other ideas whatever. The objects of all other ideas are dependent, and not final; the object of this, independent and ultimate. This Idea of an Independent and Infinite Cause, therefore, is necessarily presupposed by the conception of any dependent and finite effect. For example, a man forms a notion of his own existence. This notion involves that of dependence, which conducts him back to that on which dependence rests. He has no complete notion of his own existence without the notion of dependence; nor of that without the object on which he depends. Take our stand where we may, and reason, we come back logically to this which is the primitive fact in all our intellectual conceptions, just as each point in the circumference of a circle is a point in the radius thereof, and this leads straightway to the Centre, whence they all proceed.[2]
- ↑ Recherches de la Vérité, Liv. III. Ch. ix., as cited in Hume, Dialogues concerning Nat. Rel. Vol. II. p. 469. See Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 441-540, 7th ed.; Weisse, Die Idee der Gottheit, 1833. Some have been unwilling to attribute being to the Deity, since we have no conception nor knowledge of being in itself, still less of infinite being. Our knowledge of being is only of being this and that, a conditioned being, which is not predicable of God.
- ↑ This is not the place to attempt a proof of God's existence. In Book I. Ch. ii. I could only hint at the sources of argument. See in Weisse, Kant, and Strauss, a criticism on the various means of proof resorted to by different Philosophers. Weisse divides these proofs into three classes. I. The Ontological argument, which leads to Pantheism; II. The Cosmological, which leads to Deism; and III. The Theological, which leads to pure Theism. See Leibnitz,
