Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/32

Rh notion that it is both easier and more important to know that God is, than to know, with any sort of articulation, What God is, so that if you express even a total ignorance of the Divine nature and attribute, there are some very traditionally minded people who will hardly dare to disagree with you, while if you express the least doubt of the assertion that God is, the same people will at once view you with horror as an atheist. Now this preference in much popular religious thinking for the ontological predicate in its purity is not an altogether rational preference. Yet we shall find that it is based upon very deep and even very worthy, if vague, instincts. It is true that if I pretend to know no attributes whatever, characterizing a given object X, I seem to have won very little by believing that X nevertheless exists. Yet the fondness for the Unknowable in theology has been to some extent supported by the dim feeling that even in asserting the bare existence of a being, and especially of God, I am already committed to extremely important attributes, whose definition, even if not yet overt, is already, however darkly, implied in my abstract statement. It is interesting, therefore, to study historically what men have supposed themselves to mean by the ontological predicate.

The basis having been thus laid in the history of the subject, our lectures, at various points in the historical summary, will have at some length to undertake a critical comparison and analysis of the various meanings of the ontological predicate. Such an analysis will constantly show us unexpected connections of these meanings with the concrete interests of religion. We shall find it with