Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God

The proofs we have to deal with, regarded in their first aspect, presuppose the world in general, and, above all, its contingency. The starting-point is constituted by empirical things, and by the Whole composed of these things, namely, the world. The Whole is certainly superior to its parts, the Whole, that is to say defined as the unity which embraces and gives their character to all the parts, as, for instance, even when we speak of the Whole of a house, and still more in the case of that Whole which is a self-existent unity, as the soul is in reference to the living body. By the term world, however, we understand the aggregate of material things, the collection merely of that infinite number of existing things which are actually visible, and each of which is, to begin with, conceived of as existing for itself. The world embraces men equally with natural things. When the world is thus taken as an aggregate, and even as an aggregate merely of natural things, it is not conceived of as Nature, by which we understand something which is in itself a systematic Whole, a system of arrangements and gradations, and particularly of laws. The term world as thus understood expresses the aggregate merely, and suggests that it is based simply on the existing mass of things, and has thus no superiority, no qualitative superiority at least, over material things.

So far as we are concerned, these things further determine themselves in a variety of ways, and chiefly as limited Being, finitude, contingency, and so on. This is the kind of starting-point from which the spirit raises itself to God. It adjudges limited, finite or contingent Being to be untrue Being, above and beyond which true Being exists. It escapes into the region of another, unlimited Being, which represents the Essence as opposed to that unessential, external Being. The world of finitude, of things temporal, of change, of transitoriness, is not the true form of existence, but the Infinite, Eternal, and Unchangeable. And even if what we have called limitless Being, the Infinite, Eternal, and Unchangeable, does not succeed in expressing the absolute fulness of meaning contained in the word God, still God is limitless Being, He is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, and thus the spirit rises at least to those divine predicates or to those fundamental qualities of His nature which, though abstract, are yet universal, or at least to that universal region, to the pure ether in which God dwells.