Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/44

 or something of the kind. Now, it is well known,—that, from a given conception, those predicates which are essential to it—i.e., without which it cannot be thought—and likewise the predicates which are essential to those predicates themselves, may be extracted by means of purely logical analyses, and consequently have logical truth : that is, they have their reason of knowledge in the given conception. Accordingly the predicate reality or existence is now extracted from this arbitrarily thought conception, and an object corresponding to it is forthwith presumed to have real existence independently of the conception.


 * Wär' der Gedank' nicht so verwünscht gescheut,
 * Man wär' versucht ihn herzlich dumm zu nennen."

After all, the simplest answer to such ontological demonstrations is : " All depends upon the source whence you have derived your conception : if it be taken from experience, all well and good, for in this case its object exists and needs no further proof ; if, on the contrary, it has been hatched in your own sinciput, all its predicates are of no avail, for it is a mere phantasm. But we form an unfavourable prejudice against the pretensions of a theology which needed to have recourse to such proofs as this in order to gain a footing on the territory of philosophy, to which it is quite foreign, but on which it longs to trespass. But oh ! for the prophetic wisdom of Aristotle ! He had never even heard of the Ontological Proof ; yet as though he could detect this piece of scholastic jugglery through the shades of coming darkness and were anxious to bar the road to it, he carefully shows that defining a thing and proving its existence are two different matters, separate to all eternity ;