Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/597

Rh that other finite intelligences besides the human may not exist in eternal succession, and render this higher Being superfluous?" I answer, that it is perfectly demonstrable that an eternal succession of finite intelligences cannot necessarily exist, because there can be no necessity in an eternal series when there is no necessity in any of its parts; and, from the very conception of finite intelligence, no one finite intelligence exists necessarily. Therefore, inasmuch as it is both demonstrable and demonstrated, that an eternal succession of finite intelligences cannot necessarily exist, and inasmuch as it is also demonstrated that intelligence must necessarily exist, this Higher Being, this necessary and infinite intelligence, is not " rendered superfluous."

The principle of sufficient reason is a demonstrative principle, making the opposite a contradiction. There is one necessary and infinite intelligence, because one such is a necessity of thinking; but there is not more than one, because a contradiction is involved in the supposition that there should be two or more necessary and infinite intelligences when one such is all that the necessary laws of reason constrain us to admit.

My system has been blamed, because it only reaches an "inadequate Deity,"—that is, because the conception which I have been able to form and to exhibit of Him, does not contain and reveal His glorious perfections in their whole magnitude and