Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/156

144 their existence in thought. Now we might derive from ourselves not only the ideas of other minds like our selves, but possibly also of material objects, since these are lower in the scale of existence than ourselves, and it is conceivable that the idea of them might be got by omitting some of the qualities which distinguish ourselves. But the idea of God, of a being who is eternal and immutable, all powerful, all wise, and all good, cannot be derived from our own limited and imperfect existence. The origin, therefore, must bo sought in a being who contains actually in himself all that is contained in our idea of him. To this argument it was objected by some of the critics of Des Cartes that the idea of God as the infinite Being is merely negative, and that it is derived from the finite simply by abstracting from its conditions. Des Cartes answers that the case is just the reverse the infinite is the positive idea, and the finite is the negative, and there fore the former is the presupposition of the latter. As Kant, at a later date, pointed out that space is not a general conception, abstracted from the ideas of particular spaces, and representing the common element in them, but that, on the contrary, the ideas of particular spaces are got by the limitation of the one infinite space that is prior to them, so Des Cartes maintains in general that the idea of the finite is had only by limitation of the infinite, and not the idea of the infinite by abstraction from the partic ular determinations of the finite. It is a necessary con sequence of this that the self-consciousness of a finite being is bound up with the consciousness of the infinite. Hence the idea of God is not merely one among other ideas which we have, but it is the one idea that is necessary to our very existence as thinking beings, the idea through which alone we can think ourselves, or anything else. &quot; I ought never to suppose,&quot; says Des Cartes, &quot; that my conception of the infinite is a negative idea, got by negation of the finite, just as I conceive repose to be merely negation of movement, and darkness merely the negation of light. On the contrary, I see manifestly that there is more reality in the infinite than in the finite substance, and that there fore I have in me the notion of the infinite, even in some sense prior to the notion of the finite, or, in other words, that the notion of myself in some sense presupposes the notion of God ; for how could I doubt or desire, how could I be conscious of anything as a want, how could I know that I am not altogether perfect, if I had not in me the idea of a being more perfect than myself, by comparison with whom I recognize the defects of my own existence &quot; l Des Cartes then goes on in various ways to illustrate the thesis that the consciousness of a defective and growing nature cannot give rise to the idea of infinite perfection, but on the contrary, presupposes it. We could not think of a series of approximations, unless there were somehow pre sent to us the idea of the completed infinite as the goal we aim at. If we had not the consciousness of ourselves as finite in relation to the infinite, either we should not be conscious of ourselves at all, or we should be conscious of ourselves as infinite. The image of God is so impressed by Him upon us, that we &quot; conceive that resemblance wherein the idea of God is contained by the same faculty whereby we are conscious of ourselves.&quot; In other words, our con sciousness of ourselves is at the same time consciousness of our finitude, and hence of our relation to a being who is infinite. The principle which underlies the reasoning of Des Cartes is, that to be conscious of a limit, is to transcend it. We could not feel the limits either upon our thought or upon our existence, we could not doubt or desire, if we did not already apprehend something beyond these limits. Nay, we could not be conscious of our existence as individual selves, if we were not conscious of that which is not our selves, and of a unity in which both self and not-self are included. Our individual life is therefore to us as self- conscious beings a part of a wider universal life. Doubt and aspiration are but the manifestation of this essential division and contradiction of a nature, which, as conscious of itself, is at the same time conscious of the whole in which it is a part. And as the existence of a self and its consciousness are one, so we may say that a thinking being is not only an individual, but always in some sense identified with that universal unity of being to which it is essentially related. If Des Cartes had followed out this line of thought, he would have been led at once to the pantheism of Spinoza, if not beyond it. As it is, he is on the verge of contra diction with himself when he speaks of the consciousness of God as in some sense prior to the consciousness of self. How can anything be prior to the first principles of know ledge 1 It is no answer to say that the consciousness of God is the principium essendi while the consciousness of self is the principium cognoscendi. For, if the idea of God is prior to the idea of self, knowledge must begin where existence begins, with God. The words &quot; in some sense,&quot; with which Des Cartes qualifies his assertion of the priority of the idea of God, only betray his hesitation and his partial consciousness of the contradiction in which he is involved. Some of Des Cartes s critics &quot;presented this difficulty to him in another form, and accused him of reasoning in a circle when he said that it is because God cannot lie that we are certain that our clear and distinct ideas do not deceive us. The very existence of the con scious self, the cogito ergo sum,, which is the first of all truths and therefore prior in certitude to the existence of God, is believed only because of the clearness and distinct ness with which we apprehend it. How then, they argued, could God s truthfulness be our security for a principle which we must use in order to prove the being of God ? The answer of Des Cartes is somewhat lame. We cannot doubt any self-evident principle, or even any truth based on a self-evident principle, when we are directly contem plating it in all the necessity of its evidence ; it is only when we forget or turn away from this evidence, and begin to think of the possibility of a deceitful God, that a doubt arises which cannot be removed except by the conviction that God is true. It can scarcely be said that this is a dignus vindice nodus, or that God can fitly appear as a kind of second-best resource to the forgetful spirit that has lost its direct hold on truth and its faith in itself. God, truth, and the human spirit are thus conceived as having merely external and accidental relations with each other. What Des Cartes, however, is really expressing in this exoteric way, is simply that beneath and beyond all par ticular truths lies the great general truth of the unity of thought and existence. In contemplating particular truth, we may not consciously relate it to this unity, but when we have to defend ourselves against scepticism, we are forced to realize this relation. The ultimate answer to any attack upon a special aspect or element of truth must be to show that the fate of truth itself, the possibility of knowledge is involved in the rejection of it, and that we cannot doubt it without doubting reason itself. But to doubt reason is, in the language of Des Cartes, to doubt the truthfulness of God, for, in his view, the idea of God is involved in the very constitution of reason. Taken in this way then, the import of Des Cartes s answer is, that the consciousness of self, like every other particular truth, is 