Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/375

 this proof, and the objections he urged against it were as follows. If God is defined as the Substance of all realities, then Being does not belong to Him, for Being is no reality. It makes no difference to the Notion or conception whether it exists or does not exist, it remains the same. Already in Anselm’s day this objection was urged by a monk who said, “The fact of my forming an idea of anything does not therefore imply that the thing exists.” Kant maintains that a hundred thalers really remain the same whether I merely form an idea of them or actually possess them; consequently Being is not a reality, or real predicate, since nothing is added by it to the Notion. It may be granted that Being is not any determinate content; all the same, nothing certainly should be added to the Notion. (We may remark in passing that to speak of every wretched form of existence as a notion is to go on quite wrong lines.) On the contrary, it should be rid of the defect attaching to it in that it is merely something subjective, and is not the Idea. The Notion which is only something subjective, and is divorced from Being, is a nullity. In the form of the proof as given by Anselm, the infinitude consists in the very fact that it is not one-sided, something purely subjective to which Being does not attach. The Understanding keeps Being and the Notion strictly apart, and considers each as self-identical. But even according to the ordinary idea the Notion apart from Being is considered one-sided and untrue, and so, too, Being in which there is no Notion is looked on as notionless Being, Being which is inconceivable. This antithesis which is found in finitude cannot have any place in connection with the Infinite or God.

But it is the following circumstance which makes the proof unsatisfactory. That most perfect and most real existence is in fact a presupposition measured by which Being for itself and the Notion for itself are one-sided. Descartes and Spinoza defined God as the cause of Himself. Notion and existence form an identity; in other