The Unity of Being
Part II Section 13
[259]
Section 13
Perfection (The Ontological Argument)
This to our minds incomparably brilliant and cogent course of reasoning was initiated as is well known, by Anselm.1 We shall not consider its formulation at his hands, however, but pass at once to the famous criticisms of Kant upon this conception of the necessary existence of a Being conceived as Absolute or Perfect, that is as greater and better than any other that can be conceived. We list Kant’s objections as follows:
(a) Unconditional Necessity of existence is a necessity without conditions or grounds of necessity. Nothing can necessitate the existence of God, for that existence is necessary — if at all — upon no conditions, or in relation to nothing but God himself (478).2
(b) Necessity for thought is always hypothetical. If there are triangles, their angles are equal in sum to two right angles. If you conceive the necessarily existent (to exist) you conceive him to exist by necessity. Remove the conception of him altogether, however, and no contradiction remains. (479).
(c) The Proof begs the question. In trying to show that the mere hypothesis of God proves his existence, you [260] evidently are conceiving him not simply hypothetically, or as possible only, but already as actual. (481-2)
(d) Existence is not a degree or element in perfection. A conceived dollar is of the same quality as if it existed. Hamlet is no more imperfect in character because he is only an imaginary person. Hence the Perfect lacks no perfection even as non-existent. (483)
(e) How do we derive any meaning from the idea of necessary existence, and how do we test its consistency? (484, 541)3
We answer these points briefly here:
(a) The condition for the necessity of God’s existence for our minds is the fact that in conceiving him we must have an object, over and above our thought of an object, and that in this case, if the object is not God in his character of eternal and self-existent perfection, and as the sustaining ground of all who conceive and are in relation to him, then we are not conceiving God at all. The necessity is that we do not pretend to think the self-existent as having being as our object, and yet as having no being except that of being our object. For to conceive the self-existent as depending in this self-existence upon our thought of him is contradictory.
(b) The analogy of the triangles is irrelevant. In conceiving self-existence we cannot at the same time conceive non-existence, any more than we can conceive triangles as violating the two right angles rule.
And if we [261] do not conceive God at all, we are not considering the issue, any more than a savage. Having once seen the impossibility of conceiving God not to exist, we do not conceive him not to exist by not conceiving him at all. (Yet, in a sense, this would be so, if we could really cease in every sense to be aware of the presence of God. Our whole view is that this is impossible.)
(c) We do not argue that the hypothesis of God as merely possible implies that he exists. This, as Kant says, is a contradiction. But we argue rather that the attempt to conceive him as merely possible involves itself a contradiction; so that, either we give up the idea altogether as essentially a self-destructive conception, or we regard its object as existent. Either God is conceived as existent, or as that the truth about which is a contradiction, — namely, that the self-existent or self-sustained should be without his existence — which therefore is an element external to his nature (contradicting the hypothesis) or else is his nature but he must be conceived to lack his nature (again, a contradiction).
(d) Existence is an element in perfection,4 because the existence of the Perfect and his Perfection as Absolute Power or pure Self-Relativity and completeness, are one.
[262] Nothing more than the Perfect Nature of God can be conceived to constitute his existence. No external “there is such a being” can have anything to do with the matter. For “is” here is but God’s own encircling life, real only because and as it is realized by God himself and the creatures dependent upon him (they cannot be thought as otherwise related to him).
(e) We waive this point for the present.5
Since Kant. Hegel, Mr. Bradley, Bosanquet, Mr. C. J. Webb, Mr. H. Wildon Carr, and others have defended the argument. We preface our own discussion by a quotation from a theologian, Professor Flint:
“This reasoning (Anselm’s) found unfavorable critics even among the contemporaries of Anselm, and has commended itself completely to few. Yet it way fairly be doubted whether it has been conclusively refuted, and some of the objections most frequently urged against it are certainly inadmissible. . . . There is no force, as Anselm showed, in the objection of Gaunilo, that the existence of God can no more be inferred from the idea of a perfect being, than the existence of a perfect island is to be inferred from the idea of such an island. There neither is nor can be an idea of such an island which is greater or better than any other that can ever be conceived. . . . Only one being — an infinite, independent necessary being [263] can be perfect in the sense of being greater and better than every other conceivable being.
The objection that the ideal can never logically yield the real — that the transition from thought to fact must be in every instance illegitimate — is merely the assertion that the argument is fallacious. It is an assertion which cannot be made until the argument has been exposed and refuted. The argument is that a certain thought of God is found necessarily to imply his existence. The objection that existence is not a predicate, and that the idea of a God who exists is not more complete and perfect than the idea of a God who does not exist, is, perhaps, not incapable of being satisfactorily repelled. Mere existence is not a predicate, but specifications or determinations of existence are predicable. Now the argument nowhere implies that existence is a predicate; it implies only that reality, necessity, and independence of existence are predicates of existence; and it implies this on the ground that existence in re can be distinguished from existence in conceptu, necessary from contingent existence, self-existence from derived existence. Specific distinctions must surely admit of being predicated. That the exclusion of existence — which here means real and necessary existence — from the idea of God does not leave us with an incomplete idea of God, is not a position, I think, which can be maintained. Take away existence from among the elements in the idea of a perfect being, and the idea becomes either the idea of a nonentity or the idea of [264] an idea, and not the idea of a perfect being at all. Thus, the argument of Anselm is unwarrantably represented as an argument of four terms instead of three. Those who urge the objection seem to me to prove only that if our thought of God be imperfect, a being who merely realized that thought would be an imperfect being;6 but there is a vast difference between this truism and the paradox that an unreal being may be an ideally perfect being.”7
The Ontological Argument.
Phase 1. Thesis: The conception of the non-existence of that which is to exist, if at all, only in and of itself, — as a self-sustained, or self-existent being, — involves a contradiction.
The contradiction may be exhibited in the following two aspects:
(a) The existence of an independent or self-maintaining being is just the identical nature or spontaneously exercised power of that being. It requires no status in a realm of existence not embraced and sustained by that power, [265] and any such mode of existence in a universe surpassing itself contradicts its absolute power over its relations and its own manner of being.
Therefore, if such a being exists, it exists only within and by virtue of its own reality or self-possessed unity of life and nature. But, on the other hand, it cannot be conceived except as possessing this internal nature, reality or existence. It cannot be conceived to lack its power of self-maintenance, for this is its essential quality. And, moreover, this is also its existence.
If it be said that it can be conceived as possessing its power but as not exercising it, we reply that a being possessed of the power to exist but not existing, is a being conceived as facing the alternative: to be or not to be; and deciding upon the latter. That which has the power to exist in itself is already a reality. In another mode of expression, we may say that even an absolute’s power to exist can be real, can be only as wholly independent in its being of any other being or external fact. Therefore, the self-existent, with its power to exist of itself, either simply is — as the ground and principle of this power — or there is in no sense any such power or entity. If there is no such entity, then there is nothing which we are thinking in thinking the self-existent, — our thought is solely of itself, and hence not of self-existence: in short is contradictory of what it pretends to be, a total [266] inconsistency destroys it.
In any case, the Perfection considered in the next Phase of the Argument can not be conceived as an unexercised power. Perfection is perfectly and eternally exercised power — is pure and inalienable actuality — actus purus. The power to create an infinite and eternal good unexercised is the reverse of goodness. Therefore if the Perfect be conceived as capable of self-existing and of maintaining in itself a world of values, it must be conceived as exercising this capability and as existing.
We repeat, then, that the essentially independent cannot be conceived as apart from its existence, since such separation could only indicate separation from self —which is an entire contradiction.
(b) Since the being or existence of the self-existent is one with its unitary nature or quality, and can have nothing to do with any “existence” external to itself, either our concept of “being” is nothing more and nothing less than the idea of the Self-existent Life, or the latter idea is without meaning, having no possible connection with being — and therefore not legitimately regarded as even a conceivable mode of being. The idea of the existence of the Ultimate Being cannot be that of a non-Ultimate “existence” happening to include the Ultimate. Any existence applicable to the latter must be wholly one with its nature, bearing no possible merely external reference. Hence the [267] mere hypothesis: God exists; is the hypothesis “existence” is an all-powerful Life, with no meaning except in terms of that life. Now the hypothesis God does not exist, or there is no God, becomes correspondingly: “the existence of God” is the identification of two disparates, and therefore a contradiction; or it becomes: God being one with existence, then, since God is not, there is neither God nor existence.
The critic rejecting of course the latter alternative may find no difficulty in the former. The hypothesis “God exists” may involve a contradiction, and if so, God does not exist. Why should this not be so?
The reply that any being, thus conceived as involving a contradiction in the mere notion of its existence (which we must think to be so of God, if our notion of existence is not one in the end with our notion of God) is conceived as essentially a self-contradictory idea. That which, to be, must become a contradiction is for thought already a contradiction. The consistent conceivability of existence, and consistent meaning are all one.
Put once more, To conceive anything, even as an hypothesis, is to conceive it as a hypothetical mode or instance of Being. With an Absolute Being or Power, the hypothesis becomes the sheer identification of being and [268] absolute power.8 All the meaning possessed by the word being is exhaustively emptied into and become indistinguishably one with, absoluteness. Thus if our word being does not already mean absoluteness it becomes entirely a new word with no possible relation to its previous meaning.
And if “Being” does not mean Absoluteness, then in thinking this truth we are at the same time thinking that for Absoluteness to be would be for Being to become not-Being, and hence that the idea of the Absolute Being is the joint assertion and denial of an identity.
In a final word. If being is not the Perfect, then the hypothetical being of the Perfect is the hypothesis of being as absolutely what it is not. If the register of fact or existence is not the One, then the One’s existence is meaningless — since only the One itself can register even hypothetically its own existence.9
The conclusion of Phase 1 is thus the alternative: either the self-existent must be regarded as existent and the ground of all existence, or it must be regarded as an [269] idea fundamentally meaningless and contradictory.
In all thought there must be an object not the thought itself — if the thought is of or about anything, if it is distinguishable from no thought. And with the Self-Sustaining One, the object is either that One itself, in its character as a self-maintaining being, and therefore as existent — or else we only pretend to conceive the self-existent One, and really conceive something else.10 If we know we conceive Self-existence, we know we cannot conceive it as unreal except by admitting that at the same time we conceive it as other than self-maintaining or existent — as identical with nothing, or as an essentially undetermined or characterless meaning — as something quite other than itself, or apart from itself, as thought to be what it is not thought to be.
Objections.
(a) That Necessity of thought and necessity of existence are not identical.
The argument has not infrequently been decisively refuted by the simple observation that because we must think something to be, it does not follow that it actually is. Put in these terms, without further qualification — as sometimes happens — the refutation is nothing but ridiculous.
[270] It amounts to saying that what we must (on pain of contradiction) think to be so, we nevertheless can suppose or think may not be so. In short the contradiction is accepted as inescapable yet urged as at least possible truth. Naturally, if we can think the contradictory as possible truth no proof can avail anything, in any sphere. The refutation so far, then, is a solemn indulgence in irrelevant nonsense.
If, however, it is meant (and still better, if it is said) that no self-existent God may exist because after all the idea of his existence may be no less contradictory or meaningless than the idea of his non-existence — the primary and most rational objection of Kant — the objection has entire relevance and cannot be dismissed as without weight. We reserve discussion of this point until, in the Third Phase of the argument, we have endeavored to produce rational evidence for a belief in the consistency of the idea of God, or of a perfect Spirit, Mind, or Personality.
(b) The difficulty of the alleged “leap from idea to reality.” We can only repeat that a mere idea, implying no reality other than just itself, is a most manifest contradiction.11 If we think Perfection, for example, we do not think merely our thought of Perfection — unless we are to admit that we regard that as perfect. If there were ever any consciousness not attaining reality, no leap across such a gulf and no knowledge of any kind could be expected.
We have [271] already criticized Kant on this score, and may remark also his limitation of human thought to its own contents as mere modifications of itself, is seldom accepted by those who so enthusiastically enlist his support against the Argument we are discussing.
(c) Dragons, Centaurs and Dollars. If we think a dragon, must there not be one, on our view? The answer is in reality simple, though Kant overlooked it altogether. After all, when we think of “a dragon,” the “a” here does not represent any particular individual. No finite individual in its qualitative uniqueness or inner individuality can be conceived. The most we can do is to initiate and carry to a certain stage of completion a process of determination (by universals or classes, including time and space location) which is capable of any one of an infinite number of completions. We conceive a class formed of intersecting classes. Since we cannot conceive in its individual essence any candidate for membership in this class there is no possibility of inferring such a member from our conception. Mr. Micawber need not exist because he is not altogether an individual (how long is his nose?). A finite object is a unique individual for us only as it sustains a unique relation to us — ultimately as an actual or hypothetical direct datum of perception. Short of this test its reality is uncertain because its individuality is not cer-[272]tain.12
The mad-man’s snakes are not mere nothings. Greenness, redness, organic life, all these elements of the experience are real in other references, are not mere products of delusion. Only they are wrongly combined and located. If there were no greenness, no mad-man could conceive it,13 and when he does he does not conceive but his own conceptions
With an Absolute Mind, however, we have not a combination of qualities, but the single principle of Mind taken in its full intension, not as combined with qualifications, but as unqualified except by the essential characters of self-knowledge and self-relativity or being — essentially — for — self.
We have a quality not referable to but one [273] individual, and conceivable only as nothing except in the life of that individual. Perfection is but a word, except as we conceive an infinite self-sustaining Life or Mind. The nature of the Perfect is not a universal with respect to the Perfect Being, as an instance of it. For it is the Life of that Being as uncharacterizable except by that Being itself; unmeaning apart from it.
We have, therefore, individuality already given in the thought of God. And we have individuality in terms of eternal, inalienable, essential self-existence. We have a Being whose reality is but his internal Life, thought without which he is thought as quite other than himself.
(d) Need the idea be thought meaningful or consistent. The answer to this constitutes the last or Phase 3 of the Argument. There is an intermediate step, however, which follows.
Phase 2. Thesis: A perfect Personality can only be conceived as a wholly self-controlled and self-existent Being.
The defects of human beings consist in the limitations of their knowledge, of their good-will, and of their [274] power to execute this good-will. A person unable to know, in full, what is best to be done; a person not wholly and with a single mind intent upon doing that best; and finally a person incapable of fully accomplishing all that it sees might be done for the best: in all of these respects such a person is not the full realization of what is implied in personality. A person is a being concerned above all with social intercourse. He has the desire to comprehend his fellows, to stand in a relation of good will toward them, and to be able to execute this will effectively and to the uttermost. A Person is admirable in proportion as his understanding, his loyalty, and his ability to aid others, makes itself felt. Good-intentions coupled with futility do not impress us wholly, nor does even physical weakness appear the happiest of personal endowments.
Looking at it biologically, the aim of living beings is complete adjustment to circumstances — i.e., an ability to control the course of one’s experience with reference to an inner harmony. Man, no matter how highly developed or robust may always be robbed almost if not quite of his very sanity by sufficient physical misfortune. He is, in inescapable fashion, in a degree of bondage to the mercy of fate. This bondage not only interferes with his happiness but even, at times, with the realization of his higher capacities of knowledge, fellowship and love. Spiritual expansion is not equally possible under all external con-[275]ditions, and these conditions man cannot wholly guarantee and control.
If we are to conceive a being all that human beings in their best moments at least would gladly be but are not, we can only form such a conception in terms of perfect penetration and comprehensiveness of insight, a complete direct vision of all beings; a perfect sympathy and good-will toward all; and an unlimited power to assist them. This is the ideal apparent in friendship. We mourn the relative futility of our good offices — the faults we can do so little to transform, the difficulties we can help so little to remove, or even — often — to really understand as they are to the other facing them.
It seems on the whole a justifiable formulation of the meaning of Personality, then, to conceive such a mode of being as, at least in its ideal of itself, enjoying a complete power of understanding and control of reality, and in itself essentially and purely controlled by its own aspiration for the welfare of all that lives and is capable of desire or hope. The conclusion is, that the Perfect Person is a mind who wills the good of all, embraces all in his sympathetic insight, and who contains the being of all in the circle of his own might. If creative productivity is the great gift of man, the highest personal gift must be conceived to lie in the capacity to create the highest product of all — a person. The power to endow [276]parents with a child is a capacity beyond that of man, but an expression of love entirely in harmony with man’s aspiration and spontaneous generosity — at their highest.
The Perfectionist View of Personality, the conception of it as in principle implying absolute power as its ideal of itself, is frequently subject to challenge. Thus Schiller (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 191914) refuses to admit the possibility of social relations at all in the case of an omnipotent being. He can have no interest in anything but himself, is the argument, since he is defined as lacking nothing in himself and therefore without motive to seek his own good in the welfare of finite beings. He can pursue no purposes, for his will and reality being one, everything he desires is already so.
That all this rests upon careless and loose thinking may, we submit, be seen if we consider the premisses of Schiller’s argument. These are:
1. That an Omnipotent and Perfect Being must possess all good merely in himself as a self-enclosed and solitary consciousness, and not rather in a love expressing itself in a world of creatures, not outside of their creator, yet not in mere identity with him either, but embraced in his sustaining and beneficent activity and understanding.
2. That absolute power is unable or unwilling to limit itself in a degree sufficient to endow created beings with a power or initiative of their own. We have discussed [277] this at previous points.
3. That consequently An Absolute Mind can have no purpose to realize in time. But only in time can relations with created personalities be sustained. And love for these surely involves the willingness to assist in their aspiration toward ever higher states of being.
On the whole it seems to us manifest that the essential nature of value as preeminently generous and comprehending social intercourse, renders quite clear the ideal of good as realizable only in an adequate all-generous and all-appreciative friendship, interest, or love. But this implies the Perfect Friend. A wholly satisfactory social relationship is not possible where there is no complete knowledge or unlimited power of generous and unreserved attention to the welfare of another. And few have succeeded in supposing that a society of many Perfect Persons is conceivable (Cf. however, Dr. McTaggart’s Studies in Hegelian Cosmology — discussed in Section 12).
We reach thus the conclusion that what we in principle mean by the good involves as its ideal and standard of realization the Perfect Lover to whom no life is alien, and by whom no aspirations are misunderstood, undervalued, or refused assistance so far as they are good — i.e., tend toward the development of a similar love and will to harmony in the being concerned and those about him. Such a Perfect Lover we can conceive as owing his existence to no [278] external something or “existence” — for all must exist only within the circle of his life and by existence must mean significance in that Life. The existence of the Perfect then must be for all remaining individuals just the immanent presence of its Power, as a richness and perfection only in outline conceivable and yet dimly felt in its character as perfect. And for the perfect itself its existence can only be its possession of itself and of all things in itself.
Any other view of the meaning of existence or being in relation to the Perfect contradicts his power over all reality and over himself, and introduces some thing alien and separable which is not at one with his power, nor dependent upon him, while yet he is quite dependent upon it. No place for such an element can be found in the Concept of Perfection.
On the view of mind developed in Section 11, and on any idealistic view, again, the meaning of all meanings are relative to the mind, and hence wholly relative to a completely self-determined mind or a Perfect Person. Hence existence as a meaning qualifying the Perfect,is at one with and analytically inconceivable apart from, the Perfect itself as the source of its own reality as a meaning or possible object of thought. Hence, also, so far at least, of the idea of such existence as meaning anything in regard to it — i.e., in so far as it, the perfect, is to be thought to mean anything.
[279] We proceed now to the final stage of the argument.
Phase 3. Thesis: The consistency of the idea of a Perfect Personality is implied in the rationality or consistency of thought in general or in any given case.
Our whole thesis has endeavored to demonstrate this. And in the foregoing discussion we have argued that the idea of Personality involves as its ideal and criterion of development, the concept of the Perfect and self-dependent Person.
If such a Personality is a contradiction, then no perfect good is conceivable. In that case life is in the service of no completely worthy ideal. It realizes no wholly satisfactory good because complete satisfaction is even less than none — because it is absurd. Life, then, could be conceived as a more worthwhile activity than it is, not merely because it is only of a given value, but because any value or worth must leave something to be desired. What then, is it living beings desire — since it is more than could conceivably be had. Any finite good is clearly seen to be defective — not all that the good implies. Yet this all is to be a contradiction.
Given any quantity, one may retort, there can be a greater. We have already argued that this proves that the standard of quantity is quality. But, in the present case, we are in the realm of quality. We do not argue for a perfect [280] account of good — but for a perfect quality of goodness or power.
It may appear plausible to view life as essentially a striving for a goal which cannot be reached, or as necessarily a pressing on to a future and therefore away from a present in some way defective. But this is no solution to the problem: what is the ideal with reference to which the incompleteness of the present is tested? The goal or standard may not be attainable, but if it is inconceivable or absurd, we are aiming at less even than nothing.15
Again, from the side of knowledge, we reach the same conclusion. To conceive our knowledge as defective (and only as conceiving it so do we strive to amend it by further reflection and effort) is to view it as lacking in something a perfect Knowledge would include. Knowledge is not all it wants to be, but what it wants to be is that to be, which, would be at the same time not to be anything. All thinking is thus oriented toward a contradiction if the Perfect Mind is not its Self-Sustaining Ground.
We can, once more, only conceive the nature of reality as that which knowledge reveals it to be, plus that which it would reveal it to be if it were perfect knowledge. Any being of the thing not in terms of knowledge can be, as we have argued, nothing for knowledge.
Finally, if our analysis of mind, as essentially self-significance, is sound, the partial obscurities of the [281] of the human mind in its own understanding of itself must be taken as negations, in their degree, of what mind essentially is.
We are incomplete minds because we are incompletely mind, because we are not all that the idea of mind implies. The full implication is of a being that knows, not partially, (part knows and part fails to know), its own nature, but that simply and without qualification, knows itself, — as self-realizing being real only in and through this self-apprehension. Absolute knowledge is only knowledge taken in the full and fundamental meaning of the term. Perfect Love is no more than love without any contrary tendencies or qualifications of apathy or hostility.
We leave the matter at this point. If Perfection is not self-consistent, degrees approaching perfection are approaches to the unmeaning. Things are good relative to purposes, themselves relative or imperfectly what they ought to be, and all this relativity has no criterion of comparison. Two relatives, as we have urged repeatedly, cannot measure each other — for neither is definite unless it is fixed by a determinate standard that is determinate by being self-determined, that is, in no essential relativity to a further measure because it is the very fullness of its own ideal.
Conclusion. We may repeat the argument in this form. Even if the object of an idea can be only in the mind, as Kant [282] held, it is or has being in that mind; and it is not the mere idea of which it is the object. Blueness may be an element in the mind conceiving it. But it is the object of the conception, not the conception. In like manner, in our conception of Perfection, Perfection may be an element in our minds. But that element is not simply our thought of that element — is not simply our idea of perfection (any more than blueness is our idea of blue when we have that idea), but is perfection. Otherwise we conceive but our thought of perfection. If we conceive rather perfection itself, then Perfection or the Divine, and not our concept of it merely, are elements in our minds. But this immanence of a Divine Perfection in the human mind, which cannot be thought to depend for its self-dependent and infinite being upon our happening to conceive it, but must therefore be allowed, if a consistent object of thought at all, an eternal and all-sustaining Existence, is precisely what the argument aims to show.
If “complete knowledge,” or “Perfect Good” are not consistent objects of thought, we further argued, then all thought and all life tests itself by thinking a contradiction. To strive to know more is to think, I do not know all that I want to know. Is then such a knowing all absurd? Then to think is to strive to alter a state because it is not what it would be absurd for it to be. No mere wish to know more, can be the basis of reflective effort. For no matter how much we knew, we should be dissatisfied if any-[283]thing were omitted. This is evidence that what urges us on is not merely that we desire to know a great deal more, but that we are aware of the full implications of the ideal of mind as all-knowing.
On the other side the “nature of reality” is really inconceivable as a criterion of thought, except as we conceive an ideal limit to the extension of our apprehension of reality.16 Thus what things finally are, a conception upon which all truth rests, depends upon the thought of the Ideal Mind.
The matter is similar in judgments of worth. The person who identifies himself with the life of others in sympathetic understanding, and cooperation, is so far good. But we forever recognize the incompleteness of such loyalty and understanding. This is manifestly because we possess an inalienable Ideal. It is not merely that we know we are misunderstood. Our very conception of our real nature and value is the conception of what we might be in relation to a wholly kind and understanding person. We do not know what we are in abstraction from fellowship. And a complete chance to see and know what we are capable of is imaginable only in relation to an all-comprehending friend, wholly loving us, and wholly worthy of our love in return. Thus even our judgment of the deficiencies of human understanding of ourselves is relative to a dimly conceived Perfect Understanding and wholly unselfish Interest.
[284] Once more, as with knowledge of reality in general, all thought about persons involves an apprehension or sense of the Ultimately Good, of that worthy of unqualified approval, delight, loyalty, and reverence — to emulate which, in our degree, all our effort is, though less fully than it might be, directed, and with reference to which essentially we conceive our own true character and value.
Thus, in brief, there seems cogent evidence for the conclusion that all life and all reasoning is oriented toward a contradictory yet necessary ideal, unless this Ideal is our apprehension of a Self-Existent Divine Being, upon whom we depend, and in whom we exist.
It is to be noted, therefore, that our view of things does not depend upon a hypothetical explanation of the world simply, — if it succeeds in its endeavor, — but upon a choice between the view of all thinking as the thinking of a contradiction (of a non-existent, Absolute and Self-Existent being), and the acceptance of that Being as real, — its Life as the very meaning of “to be.”
This result has perhaps been reached in another fashion in our discussion of Knowledge as implying a reference of all meanings to a Universal and fully self-discerned or self-realizing, and Perfect Mind. But it is at least of value to know that even if the existence of such a Being could not otherwise be proved, the necessity for the non-contradictoriness of the conception of it is one [285]
with the necessity for its existence. And that this necessity, if our reasoning is sound, is in its turn one with the necessity that thought as such should be regarded as capable in principle and in any case whatever of freeing itself from self-contradiction.17
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Endnotes
1. Though already implicit in Plato’s conception of the identity of Being as such with Perfection or Perfect Being.
2. Numbers refer to pages of M. Müller’s translation of the Critique of Pure Reason. N.Y. 1920.
3. Kant supposes that since concepts get content only from direct experience or intuition, the concept of God has no real content. But this assumes that Perfection is not felt in experience as that in contrast and in relation to which we as imperfect beings have our reality or worth. The ethical sense, e.g., is for us the sense of a Perfection we strive to emulate, out of loyalty or love toward that very Perfection. (See p. 283). If the idea of God had no content it would have no meaning, and if the content is not Perfection, we do not mean or think Perfection. In short thought — as in mathematics, e.g. — experience of reality as much as sense perception.
4. We shall see that existence is a predicate since it involves individualization, whereas the conceived is only a class, not a genuine individual.
5. Save for a quotation: “The idea of the Absolute is not reducible to a rule of synthesis” (as Kant held it to be in opposing the Ontological Argument). “Synthesis is one of the many innumerable predicates of God . . . the main criticism to bring against Kant in this connection is that he has terribly impoverished the idea of God.” Lossky, op. cit., p. 131.
6. It may be asked: how can God be more than what is meant by our (imperfect) idea — and so how can he be perfect? The answer is, of course, that our idea of God is not merely our imperfect conception, but involves the Immanent self-consciousness of God, and so is able to mean this perfect reality by the latter’s own aid — otherwise it could not; which is a form of the proof.
7. Quoted on page xxiii, The Open Court Volume of Translations of Anselm’s works (Chicago, 1903), from Robert Flint, Theism, New York (1893, seventh edition) p. 278 et seq.
8. Thus to imagine any separability of “Being” and “Absoluteness” is to deny that the latter is really qualified wholly in terms of Being-for-self, and that it is not conceivable as related to anything not dependent upon itself.
9. It should perhaps need no pointing out that we thus meet the supposition that the self-existence of the Absolute is only a that which “if it existed,” would exist of itself and necessarily; for this if it existed implies: if “existence” as such were an Absolute Life. But the idea of existence as what in fact it is not (if it is true God does not exist and conceive this truth) is the idea of there existing another fundamental meaning of existence. Since the first “existence” must retain its present meaning to render the hypothesis significant we have again a contradiction — the idea of existence as not existence or to be as not to be.
10. Cf. Spinoza’s Axiom: “The essence of that which can be conceived as not existing does not involve existence” — i.e., is not a self-existent nature, nor can be conceived as such. Here is the proof in a word.
11. Cf. Lossky, op. cit.: “To think of what is not, and is not recognized as standing over against us in the act of judging is utterly impossible . . . Expressed accurately, the meaning of the judgment ‘God exists’ is thus: ‘the existence of God’ is a real existence and not an existence in people’s imagination or in virtue of my subjective activity.” (p. 237) Now conceive the self-subsistent and perfect (not the conception of it but the object of the concept) as thinkable as a phase merely of our own dependent and imperfect activity!
12. The idea of Mr. Micawber thus is an imagined experience of him. We can suppose him not to exist because we can deny that our imagined perception is a genuine presence of an individuated or objectively determined object. In conceiving God, however, as an all immanent Reality present everywhere and in all experience in any way related to him, we have an idea which either has no object or else has as object a Being which is directly and universally given in some degree of awareness of its reality. We have, in short, the idea of a Being who is being, whose nature is the essence of existence; in short of a Being which is given if anything is given as real.
13. This seems the point of Descartes’ alternate form of the Argument, i.e., that we could not invent the idea of perfection. The point is not merely that we find in psychology the trail of perception in all imagination. But that to create an idea is not to create the object of that idea. If in producing the idea of perfection we produced the perfection of which we think we should be producing God. The objection that our idea of the perfect is not perfect and therefore could be produced by us is just what the argument wants. If in conceiving God the only objective mean is our own idea of God, then we conceive not the perfect but the imperfect. And if we mean perfection as more than our idea, which is imperfect, we cannot pretend at the same time to mean or conceive a pure non-entity as — to perfection, nor any thing separable in thought from its full existence or inner self-reality.
14. Supplementary, Vol. II
15. A perfect quantity of good is we admit absurd. But if the sole standard were quantitative then its employment would involve the completion of the regress indicated at previous points — Sections (8 and 10).
16. If for an idea to be false is meaningful, for it to be true might be supposed to be also. But to think a true idea in good earnest is to conceive a perfectly self-clear meaning embracing its object completely, i.e., to conceive an element of an ultimate or perfect mind.
l7. Or at least of falsity — the conception of the One as having reality for and in itself, and all things in and by means of it, when in fact it has no being or reality at all.