Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/552

524PROP. XI.——————— man existed, and that the universe was something or other before man existed; so neither can we help thinking that before man existed, a supreme and eternal intelligence existed, in synthesis with all things. In the estimation of natural thinking, the universe by itself is not the contradictory; in our ordinary moods we suppose it capable of subsisting by itself. Hence, in our ordinary moods, we see no necessity why a supreme intelligence should be postulated in connection with it. But speculation shows us that the universe, by itself, is the contradictory; that it is incapable of self-subsistency, that it can exist only cum alio, inasmuch as it can be known only cum alio, and can be ignored only cum alio; that all true and cogitable and noncontradictory existence is a synthesis of the subjective and the objective; and then we are compelled, by the most stringent necessity of thinking, to conceive a supreme intelligence as the round and essence of the Universal Whole. Thus the postulation of the Deity is not only permissible, it is unavoidable. Every mind thinks, and must think of God (however little conscious it may be of the operation which it is performing), whenever it thinks of anything as lying beyond all human observation, or as subsisting in the absence or annihilation of all finite intelligences.

2. To this conclusion, which is the crowning truth