Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/249

230 A good while later, in the history of thought, the Scholastic Theory of Being, as I a moment since observed, met with still a new instance of our present sort of reality. This instance brings us directly on to theological ground.

St. Augustine, who stands historically on the boundary line between the earlier and later philosophy of the church, proved God’s existence by this noted argument: — There must be a Veritas, a Truth. For if you deny that there is a truth, you assert that it is true that there is no truth; and then you contradict yourself. The sum total of truth, conceived as a unity, is, however, the very essence of God. This argument, in one direction, looks backwards towards Neo-Platonic doctrine. St. Augustine’s world of Veritas is the Nous of Plotinus. In another direction, the Augustinian proof of God’s existence leads on to St. Anselm’s Ontological Proof. The representative philosophy of the greater Scholastic period abandoned both St. Augustine’s and St. Anselm’s proof as invalid, but retained the conception of Veritas as part of the definition of the divine nature.

The result is the form of our Third Conception, to which we next mean to call attention. In the classic doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas, the theory of the nature of God, to which we referred in our second lecture, is a very skilful synthesis of mystical, Platonic, and Aristotelian elements, influenced, of course, by still other traditional motives. According to this doctrine, the divine Essence, the Godhead as it is in itself, is above all, like the Hindoo Atman, simply one and per-