Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/43

 sea quia ipsa ejus naturæ immensitas est CAUSA, SIVE RATIO, propter quam nulla causa indiget ad existendum. He ought to have said : The immensity of God is a logical reason from which it follows, that God needs no cause ; whereas he confounds the two together and obviously has no clear consciousness of the difference between reason and cause. Properly speaking however, it is his intention which mars his insight. For here, where the law of causality demands a cause, he substitutes a reason instead of it, because the latter, unlike the former, does not immediately lead to something beyond it ; and thus, by means of this very axiom, he clears the way to the Ontological Proof of the existence of God, which was really his invention, for Anselm had only indicated it in a general manner. Immediately after these axioms, of which I have just quoted the first, there comes a formal, quite serious statement of the Ontological Proof, which, in fact, already lies within that axiom, as the chicken does within the egg that has been long brooded over. Thus, while everything else stands in need of a cause for its existence, the immensitas implied in the conception of the Deity—who is introduced to us upon the ladder of the Cosmological Proof—suffices in lieu of a cause or, as the proof itself expresses it : in conceptu entis summe perfecti existentia necessaria continetur. This, then, is the sleight-of-hand trick, for the sake of which the confusion, familiar even to Aristotle, of the two principal meanings of the principle of sufficient reason, has been used directly in majorem Dei gloriam.

Considered by daylight, however, and without prejudice, this famous Ontological Proof is really a charming joke. On some occasion or other, some one excogitates a conception, composed out of all sorts of predicates, among which however he takes care to include the predicate actuality or existence, either openly stated or wrapped up for decency's sake in some other predicate, such as perfectio, immensitas,