Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/44

Rh to show that, corresponding to the definition, there is a reality. And, on the other hand, the proof that one can offer for God’s presence at the heart of the world constitutes also the best exposition that one can suggest regarding what one means by the conception of God.

Yet, of course, some preliminary definition of what one has in mind when one uses the word “God” is of value, since our proof will then involve a development of the fuller meaning of just this preliminary definition. For this preliminary purpose, I propose to define, in advance, what we mean under the name “God,” by means of using what tradition would call one of the Divine Attributes. I refer here to what has been called the attribute of Omniscience, or of the Divine Wisdom. By the word “God” I shall mean, then, in advance of any proof of God’s existence, a being who is conceived as possessing to the full all logically possible knowledge, insight, wisdom. Our problem, then, becomes at once this: Does there demonstrably exist an Omniscient Being? or is the conception of an Omniscient Being, for all that we can say, a bare ideal of the human mind?

Why I choose this so-called attribute of Omniscience as constituting for the purposes of this argument the primary attribute of the Divine Being, students of philosophy — who remember, for instance, that the Aristotelian God, however his existence was proved, was defined by that thinker principally in terms of the attribute of Omniscience — will easily understand, and you, as members of this Union and readers of my former discussion, will perhaps especially com-