The Riddle of God (MS Notes)

The question of God, like most other vexations of philosophy and science, has

undergone a decisive transformation since the turn of the century. In brief, the question

has changed from one of truth to one of serviceability. This transformation is

symptomatic of a general self-consciousness, which has been attained by thoughtful

individuals and aggregates since the decisive outputs of Darwin, Marx, and Freud (the

last two of whom were inspired by Feuerbach, of whom more later). The human

situation, in its entirety, was before regarded in the light of assumptions and dogmas

concerning the superhuman situation; at present, the human situation – secularly and

scientifically conceived – is taken quite for granted, while every conception of the

superhuman (or even extra-human) is referred to it, or placed within its context. In other

words, the question is hardly anymore over the truth of these conceptions but only of

their origin and function in the human biological situation. It is not so much that God is

taken, out of hand, to be chimerical but that the significance of that conception has been

recognized not to extend beyond the socio-political realm, that is, that the only import it

may possibly have is in the ways that it plays itself out in men’s action and interaction.

Thus, whether or not there actually is a sequel to this life, to which death is merely a

transition, has been generally perceived to be an insoluble problem, and therefore moot.

The notion is not, however, without significance therefore. Instead, its considerable

significance is recognized to consist in the judgments of relative worth – and the acts

issuing therefrom – to which men are compelled or inclined by belief, or absence

thereof, in such a sequel. In other words, it matters very little what is true in this regard;
what alone matters is what men believe to be true (or do not believe to be true or

believe not to be true, whatever the case may be). Furthermore, it has been generally

recognized, if not often articulated, that religious convictions do not have perceptible

objects for their ideata but are inferences of somewhat dubious generation and

precarious validity. Belief in God is not anything men profess because they perceive

the belief to be warranted, but because they perceive the profession of belief in the

proposition’s truth to be eminently serviceable, regardless of its “truth-value”. Likewise,

mutatis mutandis, with a-theism. There is no call whatsoever for men to believe in any

extra-natural personal deity, unless it be the need of some ground of social and political

alliance. Nothing, in fact, is more evident than the schism, or discrepancy, between

what men formally profess when asked what they believe and the convictions that may

be perceived to inform and inspire their daily practice. Profession of belief in the

Judao-Christian God’s existence is often commendable and therefore useful; in the

present state of social and economic organization, however, it is not especially

commendable or useful to behave as if the Judao-Christian God existed. This would

require a practical defiance of the principles of conduct in business and recreation on

which mundane existence is currently founded. What this means, in effect, is that one’s

choices are between hypocrisy and ruin. Because the hypocrisy is shared and

sanctioned (ignored) by all, its potential harassment of conscience is pre-empted, while

any actual harassment is promptly neutralized by specious apology to the moral

sensibility. Herein lies the significance of Marx’s division of civilization into a material

sub-structure and an idealogical superstructure: whether or not a man will believe in

God (for instance) depends not on whether he perceives it to be true, for perception of

its truth or untruth is evidently impossible; it depends, rather, on whether or not

profession of such belief will put some kind of bread on the table, so to speak. If

prompted to justify this profession and this belief, a man is not permitted to be honest

and declare “I believe in God because if I did not, I would have a miserable falling-out

with my devout wife, my friends, my employer…” Though this is his primary motive and

though he knows it to be so, articulation of it would discredit his belief and undercut the

entire program. (This is a very interesting phenomenon and would admit of fruitful

investigation: that a person’s standing in the affection of his coevals may depend so

decisively on what he professes to believe and not nearly so much on how he actually

believes and behaves.) Of course, religious and moral conviction is not merely

utilitarian and forward-looking; it is also customary and inertial. Nothing is more evident

than that the common run of men hold what convictions they do for no more substantial

reason than that they have never bothered seriously to entertain an alternative. With all

possible prudence, they leave well enough alone and do not allow intellectual and

dialectical subtleties to upset a balance that is no less certain for all its relative

thoughtlessness. (It is perhaps no cause for wonder that they give to their critical

faculty a much longer leash in the face of opposing doctrines.) Despite the

commendable sentiment of J.S. Mill, it is not better to be a man dissatisfied than a pig

satisfied, for much the same reason that it is not better to be a rich man thrice divorced

that a poor man long married to a loving woman. In each case, the difference in

redeeming essentials outweighs that between non-salvific superfluities. In most cases,

his religion will lie at the periphery of a man.

The universal and spontaneous inclination to religious belief – theistic or

animistic or whatever – admits of two general explanations, which are diametrically

opposed but are not, in the last analysis, inimical. On the one hand, it may be explained

– as by Feuerbach, Freud, and Marx – as a sort of techne, a collection of tools and

stratagems by which men manipulate their environment, and not least one another, to

their own advantage. On the other hand, religious conviction may be explained as the

confused and inarticulate expression of men’s real and honest awareness of a real

Ultimacy to which they stand in one kind of relationship or another. Each of these

general attitudes toward religious belief is appropriate as far as it goes. But neither

goes very far at all without the other. Any adequate account of the nature and function

of religious belief must accomplish a synthesis of the two approaches. An examination

of the famous (or infamous) Ontological Argument will serve, as well as anything else,

to inaugurate such a synthesis.

Confronted with the Ontological Argument, one feels as though in the presence

of the most charming of rogues. Every outward sign indicates his trustworthiness; still,

an indefinite but undeniable intuition persists that he is a deceiver. Since its first

formulation by Anselm, the OA has not ceased to occupy philosophers and theologians

of every stripe. Many seem to believe that the argument was decisively refuted by

Kant’s objection (actually pirated wholesale from Hume) that existence cannot be a

predicate. Later it will be demonstrated that this refutation does not succeed. The OA is

perhaps too well-known to require re-statement. Nonetheless, in the interest of

completeness, it is here given once more. God is first defined as that than which

nothing greater or more perfect can be conceived, and then his existence is perceived

to follow necessarily from the definition of him. The mere thought of such a being is

supposed to be as good as identical with a judgment that that being exists in re. In

other words, the existence of its object is perceived to be the necessary and sufficient

condition of having the thought itself. Therefore, to imagine, define, think, or conceive

of God is ipso facto to judge that it exists. Two related distinctions are operative here:

first, between the necessary and the contingent and second, between the perfect and

the imperfect. These distinctions, of course, dissolve into that between the existent and

the non-existent. Contingency is an imperfection and the pinnacle of imperfection is

non-existence; contingency is nothing but the possibility of non-existence, while

necessity is nothing but the impossibility thereof. If there are degrees of perfection and

imperfection, then it seems there should also be degrees of necessity and contingency,

as well as of existence and non-existence. Superficially, these last two notions appear

absurd; as will be demonstrated, however, they are not only perfectly cogent but vital to

an understanding of theistic conviction. Surely, men are inclined to speak of existence

as either belonging to a conception’s ideatum or as not belonging to it. They do not

speak of certain things as being more existent than others, or of one thing being

perhaps one-fourth as necessary as another. Still, this is what is implied in Anselm’s

identification of existence as a perfection and of perfection as a matter of degrees. That

identification was surely not Anselm’s alone but was shared with him by nearly all of the

Schoolmen, to whose minds contingency (possible non-existence) was a dependency

and therefore an imperfection, while necessity (impossible non-existence) was absolute

independence and therefore a perfection. At first glance it seems that Anselm is only

begging the question; having begun with existence defined as a perfection and God as

most perfect, it is hardly any wonder that Anselm ends with the necessary existence of

God. Here enters the problem of whether existence is a predicate. If it is, then the

existence of anything whatsoever can be demonstrated simply by first defining it

somehow as existent and then appealing to the definition. However, as Hume pointed

out and Kant reiterated, no object can be thought of except as existing. Therefore,

either no object’s existence can be demonstrated by appeal to the bare thought of it, or

else the existence of any object, howsoever blatantly non-existent, can be so

demonstrated. Existence cannot be a predicate, then, precisely because it can be

“predicated” of every conceivable thing; therefore, it fails to serve the function of a

predicate, which is to say something determinate and positive about a subject, thus

setting it apart from things not itself.

But the OA cannot be so flippantly dismissed. If existence is not a predicate then

nothing is. The distinction between the existent and the non-existent, whatever its

ultimate nature or grounds, is the most important and difficult distinction that men can,

and indeed must, make. The OA, itself, is perfectly valid and without error. The

unmistakeable and unshakeable discomfort that it provokes are not the recognition of

any flaw in its foundation or progression. They arise, instead, from a linking of this

sound argument to the manifest absurdity of what it is erroneously supposed to prove.

The word “God” is assumed – before, during, and after the encounter with the OA – to
signify the Judao-Christian God. That God is a full-blown person, an individual

possessed of will, passion, interest, energy, heart, hands, eyes, mind. He is, in other

words, a racial phenomenon. As such, he is finite and therefore incongruous, to almost

the last degree, with the assumptions and principles of the OA. A severe disjunction

occurs in the mind of the reader, who feels himself forced by the argument to leap

impossibly from “that than which a greater cannot be conceived”, which is a naked fact,

to the God of Abraham, which is a racial fact. Such a leap cannot be accomplished and

can be pretended to only nominally and perfunctorily (?).

Which of the two courses, elucidated above, a person will take is determined

multifariously by his own inveterate temperament and its complicated relations with

each of the several aspects of the ambient culture. Reason itself, however, takes not

the part of either path against the other; that office is left to a person’s passions (?). As

regards a Necessary and Ultimate Something, no person can deny it; nor can any

person successfully contest the propensity of men to believe and profess only what they

imagine will aid their own causes to believe and profess. Only when men take a mind to

attribute other qualities than Necessity and Ultimacy to God – such as benevolence,

justice, etc. – does wrangling commence (or rather, persist). That such a Something

exists neither needs nor receives argument. But its more particular nature, or mode of

existence, is ever the point of contention. The reason for this is that “God” is universally

supposed to signify the necessary cause and condition of the contingent realm. The

vexation is that that realm – as experienced by men – is of such diverse and

contradictory composition that its cause, or fount, cannot be consistently held to be of a

unified and consistent – that is, a rational and intelligible – composition. By way of

analogy, consider the body of Shakespeare’s work. What could (or better, what could

not) be said of that man, were only his plays available for consultation? That by Romeo

he was a lover? Then by Iago he was a hateful villain. That by Hamlet he was

melancholy and keen of mind? Then by Silvius he was as hopeful as dull. That by

(priest) he was a high-minded saint? Then by Falstaff he was the grossest sinner. The

point is well made. On the testimony of the plays alone, all that is positively and

determinately know of their author is that he must have existed; anything else, in point

of this, is groundless speculation. The plays and poems of Shakespeare are of such

diverse and contradictory composition that all things and their opposites may be from

them inferred of Shakespeare himself. At that point, however, “Shakespeare” comes

practically to represent a non-entity. Matters are no otherwise with the universe at

large; indeed, the problem is indefinitely magnified in this case. The direst

complications ensue when men think to deny some attribute – e.g. wickedness – to

God, for they must then account for its presence in the effect of which he is held to be

the sole and sufficient cause. It may be imagined what curious conniptions scholars

would be thrown into if they worked on the assumption that Shakespeare could think no

evil!

In this case, then, as in so many others, each party to the controversy is in

possession of that half of the whole which the other lacks. For it is true that God –

insofar as it is thought to possess moral sensibility and interests – is wholly an invention

of collective fancy, the propagation of which is a partisan, parochial, and self-seeking

endeavor. Nonetheless, it is also true that God – insofar as it is thought to be

Necessary (infinite and eternal) – is wholly a recognition, or perception, by the senses

and the intellect in tandem.

The first and last problem of philosophy is that of definition. As the great Voltaire

stipulated: “If you would talk with me, then define your terms!” Because one name may,

and has, been given by each of a thousand persons to each of a thousand different

things, confusion has plagued all the relations of philosophy, science, and religion. The

trouble, of course, is that the centerpiece of many discussions is precisely that which is

to be adequately defined. Even so, a provisional definition – understood from the outset

as subject to change – must be available, or else discussion cannot even begin.

Nowhere is the matter of definition either more problematic or of more importance than

in the case of God. The signification of that word is so various and contradictory that it

seems no “essence” – indeed, nothing at all – remains over after every pair of opposites

has been allowed to nullify itself. A further impediment to any profitable discussion of

God is furnished by its intimate relation to religion in general. Not every religion is

theistic, nor is every theism religious; nevertheless, neither phenomenon can be

discussed at all adequately without a simultaneous thorough discussion of the other.

Still another difficulty – especially pertinent but hardly endemic to the problem of God –

is the necessity of drawing a distinction between, on the one hand, examination of the

“truth value” of the notion and, on the other hand, examination of the sources and

ramifications of the notion within the nexus of human relations. Indeed, as shall be
seen, whether the distinction is legitimate is not only a primary question of natural

theology but of philosophy in general.

Many attempts have been made to articulate the “very least” that the notion of

God must involve, if it is not to become something other than what it is. This is nearly

impossible and results inevitably in the circumscription of subsequent discussion to the

neglect of much that is germane to it.

A last complication consists in the inevitable tendency of scholars to ignore what

may be called “popular theology” in favor of those few brilliant and well-articulated

theologies that certainly occupy every respectable library but do not necessarily

exercise a pull on history. The scholar is always beguiled into taking the School for the

World. The student of philosophy knows well the majesty of Spinoza’s system, as the

student of theology knows that of Aquinas’s. Outside of academic circles, however,

these worldviews are hardly operative, or operative only tangentially. At the same time,

the causal connections are of exceedingly difficult discernment; in the final analysis, no

one perhaps may perceive the remote role of Spinoza’s theology in, for instance, the

drafting of the United States Constitution.

The notion of God transforms, and is transformed by, human endeavor, both

individual and collective. It is indeed possible to draw provisional parallels between, for

instance, Aristotle’s and Spinoza’s Gods, Christ and Akhenaton, Zeus and YHWH,

Ahriman and the Great Spirit, etc. With what justification, however, they are all

collected under the name “God” is something of a mystery. Adding to all of this the

complications introduced into theology by the natural sciences and Feuerbach, the
serious student of this conception is left with quite a mess.

The final, and certainly the greatest, impediment of investigation into the question

of God, conducted along any lines, is the seeming impossibility of sufficient emotional

detachment from the controversy. Because God, however conceived, has in the course

of history become an overwhelmingly personal and political phenomenon, discussions

of its nature and value are always and from the beginning contaminated with one or

another affection or set of affections; such discussions are, therefore, inimical from the

beginning to the attitude of science. God has always been more a matter of emotion

and polemic than of science. A sufficiently cold eye has surely never been cast on this

phenomenon. Theists and atheists alike have, nine times out of ten, tailored their

arguments and investigations to conclusions to which affection has led them long

before; often, also, the agnostic bows out not on principle but from fear or fatigue. The

present dissertation is an attempt to remedy these problems. Its ambitious purpose is

two-fold: first, to provide an historico-sociological account of the sources, functions, and

transformations of theology in the realm of human society and second, to demonstrate

the only way that the question of God’s existence can be rationally and scientifically

answered. Given the nature of the subject, this purpose has inevitably resulted in the

spinning out of another of those “systems of philosophy” that have fallen so far out of

fashion in latter days. It is a feeble philosophy that does not begin by asking the

question of God and end with at least the bare bones of an answer to it; indeed, it is in

this way that philosophy proper is distinguished from literature, science, and religion.

God is not a problem for these last. For literature it is a symbol, for science an absurdity
or an irrelevance, for religion a given. Philosophy is first and last a wrestling with the

riddle of God.

A further complication is furnished by the decidedly uncouth intrusion of several

popular science writers into the fray, claiming to speak on behalf of the spirit, methods,

and history of science. This is unfortunate because the erudition of these men will

certainly deceive and intimidate many among the lay population that these men are

acting within the bounds of propriety, when in fact they are not. That science is

equipped to handle questions of existence – whether of God or of anything else – is as

absurd an implication as any ever made. Certainly, God – howsoever defined – is not a

datum of experience but is the terminus of a series of inferences. The question, simply

put, is of the validity of the entire inferential chain, from the initial premise to the final

conclusion. The question of God is, in its very nature, not merely an isolated question

of the existence of some hypothesized thing but of the existence of existence itself;

here, to be sure, science oversteps its boundaries. A pet doctrine of the popular

scientists is the random, non-teleological nature of evolution. That this doctrine is

untestable, conjectural, and not supportable by any evidence whether actual or

potential, is evident. A proof of randomness is a notion perfectly absurd, even a

contradiction in terms. “Absence of evidence” as one popular scientist has said, “is not

evidence of absence.” Furthermore, on most cogent provisional definitions of God, the

very notion of substantiating evidence for or against its existence is ridiculous. It is

perhaps true that the definition has sometimes been deliberately contrived to side-step

the merciless scrutiny of science. In the last analysis, however, science can only
remain mute even on the question of the existence of a tree (for instance) because

existence is not an empirical phenomenon but a label applied to certain of the mind’s

contents and withheld from others, on grounds entirely other than those on which

science operates.

It is important to recognize that, as a matter of purely historical fact, God is not

the conclusion of a series of inferences but subsists from earlier ages, when the

conception arose so spontaneously and ubiquitously as to provide the uncriticizable

background of every other dimension of experience. The equally organic emergence of

the conditions of the criticism – and finally the wholesale repudiation – of theology is in

large part the subject of the present investigation. The historical fact is that deity has

always been a given; in a very real sociohistorical sense, there was never a time that

God was not. The burden of proof seems always to have fallen on the side of

philosophical a-theism, which, it must be remembered, is a very late and still rare

phenomenon.

The questions of theism, on the one hand, and of the existence of God, on the

other, must be kept separate to the utmost possible extent. Nevertheless, as shall be

demonstrated, each comes forcibly to bear on the other. The question of God’s

existence is subject to many different formulations and answers. It is asked, “Does God

exist?” The nature of the concept at hand strictly outlaws the possibility of sensory, or

perceptory, witness either pro or contra. The question is then posed: “What would be

the case if God, so defined, actually did exist? Is this the case? If it is, then the answer
is yes and if not no. (Shakespeare discussion.) This procession inevitably gives rise to

epistemological quandaries because “what is the case” is found to be of considerably

less easy determination than was assumed.

Because God per se is not, and cannot be, an immediate datum of experience, the

principal fact with which any investigation into the question of God must deal is theistic

belief itself. The whole question is thus subtly transformed from “Does God exist?” or

“Are theists justified in their belief?” to “How are theistic and a-theistic conviction best

accounted for?” In this connection it will be very profitable to briefly consider some

analogous problems, for instance, ghosts, extraterrestrial creatures, and the sasquatch.

Each of these phenomena is witnessed to by hosts of evidently sane individuals, so that

their reported experiences cannot be dismissed, out of hand, as ridiculous, illusory,

mendacious, or mad. Even so, those phenomena are anomalous through and through;

they do not constitute a significant portion of normal collective experience. The

possibility, therefore, that such experiences are of actual, rather than merely mental,

phenomena is casually or vigorously dismissed, typically in favor of an “explanation”

amounting to a bald insistence that ghosts, aliens, etc. simply do not exist, and

therefore any experience of them is an instance of psychic or moral deviance from the

norm. In the case of ghosts, for instance, it is well known that multitudes of people have

reported experience of them; such people are still a severe minority, and their

experiences, although of a similar nature across the board, are nevertheless never

collective and always isolated and private. At a glance, several explanations of these
phenomena are available. Either 1) these experiences are of real objects. That they

are rare and anomalous does not furnish a presumption against their validity but only

indicates that their objects are rare and anomalous; or 2) these experiences are illusory

through and through. These illusions are, of course, of a special kind, as they are not

so rare and idiosyncratic as to be psychotic; or 3) the experiences are indeed of real

objects but have been misread and/or misnamed. Thus, UFOs are clandestine

government aircraft, the sasquatch is a gorilla, etc; or 4) the reports of these

experiences are either elaborate and bizarre hoaxes or are entirely inspired and

informed by some original and contagious hoax, which they perpetuate. None of these

general explanations is at all satisfactory. Germane to the present discussion is the

sharp bifurcation of explanations between, on the one hand, those that attribute a

passive role to the agent and, on the other hand, those that attribute to the agent an

active role. The source of the experience is located either in the subject himself or else

in that dubious proposition, “the real world”. The third type of explanation, it will be

noticed, attempts to compromise between these two accounts (correspondence theory,

overlap, mind falls short of world).

Here enter the epistemological quandaries mentioned above. The question of

the sources and motives and causes of a given belief must, it seems, be kept strictly

apart from the question of its “truth value” or “truth content”. Many thousands of people

are convinced that Paris is in France on no stronger authority than oral report from

individuals assumed to be trustworthy; interestingly enough, the scientific community

has not bothered to chide anyone for this. Likewise, theistic conviction can always be
explained as a powerful and ubiquitous illusion, the tendency to which is perhaps

biologically inescapable but nonetheless illusory (reword).

When asking whether the inference of God’s existence would be a sound one it

will not do to ask, “Does the natural order exhibit intelligent design, does it tend toward

some discernible end?” This is only to pose the same question again. No one will fare

better in the search for “intelligence” or “progress” than in the initial search for God; all

the terms are practically synonymous.

To sum up: the function served by the conception of God is never an explanatory one

and indeed can never be an explanatory one. Only after God was rendered problematic

were attempts made to defend the initial conception by rational appeal to its

“explanatory power” or “logical necessity”.

The trouble with the argument from necessity runs much deeper than all this

wrangling about predicates would suggest. For the argument does not begin by

premising the existence of any isolated thing from which nothing necessary could be

inferred except some proximate cause or condition equally as phenomenal and

conditional as the effect. Instead, the argument includes in its first premise the

existence of the comprehensive empire of reality (the Sum), that is, with the existence of

sheer existence. From there the argument induces (or assumes) some cause or

condition of the existence of existence, which can be nothing less that what cannot
possibly not exist. But the notion that existence per se either needs or is capable of

causal explanation is not merely unsupportable but ridiculous. The existence of

anything other than existence itself, to which the latter is causally related, is evidently

absurd. (A primitive intimation of this logical verity is evidenced by the majority of the

ancient creation accounts, which begin not with the gods but with some primordial

Formless and Boundless, from which the gods themselves emerge.) More sensible by

far is the notion that existence is its own cause, or what comes to the same thing, that

existence is eternal and uncaused. This conclusion has proved intensely problematic to

many (though not all) theologians precisely because it eradicates that substantial

ontological and moral distinction between God and the world on which most theology

(and also the fate of most priesthoods) hinges. In other words, it is a dangerous

flirtation with pan-theism.

Many writers have seized on the word “perfection” in Anselm’s argument and

called attention to its ambiguity and implausibility, particularly in relation to the word

“existence” which is presupposed by Anselm to be a perfection. However, neither

perfection nor existence is very problematic at all (unless the subject of the proof is

taken to be the Judao-Christian-Islamic God). Where “perfection” is taken – and it is

almost always taken – to be of moral, aesthetic, or utilitarian signification, then the word

presents definite complications. If, however, perfection is taken – as by Spinoza – to be

a matter of biology, then the notion crystallizes and becomes perfectly cogent.

Perfection, in this case, is nothing more complicated or ambiguous than the capacity to
influence other entities and to resist their influence. In other words, perfection is power,

as conventionally understood. Perfection, as customarily used, indicates nothing more

substantial than a degree of satisfaction experienced by the person casting judgment,

under the influence of the object he is judging. “A perfect dinner” is one that satisfies

the palate and the belly; “a perfect painting” is one that satisfies the artistic sensibility,

etc. In this sense, “a most perfect being” is certainly an absurdity. However, if

perfection is taken as a biological measure, or scale, then “a most perfect being” is

perfectly sensible and objective; it would be that entity that exercises the most influence

on other entities while suffering the least from their influence. Herein lies the

significance of Spinoza’s equation of power, virtue, knowledge, and action. It must, of

necessity, be granted that such a being exists. Anselm’s argument, of course, has very

little explicitly to do with “the most perfect being”, which must not be confused, as by

Guanilo, with “that than which a greater cannot be conceived”. The foregoing

discussion is pertinent nonetheless.

Anselm himself (and subsequently many others) gently chided Guanilo when the

latter spoke of “the greatest of all things” as if it were identical with “that than which a

greater cannot be conceived”. In truth, that the two are indeed identical is easily

recognized by anyone not easily beguiled by verbal legerdemain. A greater than the

greatest of all things can obviously not be conceived, unless “the conceived” is identical

with “the real”, in which case disputes over what is real and what is not are without end

or value. For let the greatest of all things first be conceived. Because it is conceived
(defined) as existent it is ex hypothesi an extramental reality. Now, let some thing

greater than it be conceived. But this is impossible because, by Anselm’s own lights,

what exists outside the mind is, in virtue of that fact, greater than what exists only in the

mind (the meaning of these phrases has been discussed). But the conception of the

greatest of all things cannot be made into the conception of something actually greater

simply by imagining ought else added to it, for the resulting conception exists only in the

mind and cannot, therefore, be actually greater than the initial “greatest of all things.”

The greatest of all things is, therefore, that than which nothing greater can be conceived

and vice versa.

The main trouble, then, is that the term “greater” or “more perfect” has ever been

understood to signify some subjective valuation of the object in question. It was

certainly not so for Anselm and need not have been so for subsequent writers, except

that they have been lulled into confusion by a customary usage.

Existence is indeed a predicate precisely because its application to a conceived

object places it in one of the two broadest polar categories available to the intellect, the

other category being, of course, the non-existent. The distinction between the idea of a

hundred dollars and an actual hundred dollars – indeed, the element that renders even

this provisional distinction between the two at all possible – consists in the fact that

imaginary money cannot, and must not, be reckoned with, while actual money impinges

itself upon the planning capacity. This, indeed, is the whole meaning of “existence”. To

say of the idea of a hundred dollars that it has no correspondent in reality – that its
ideatum does not exist – is to say nothing more or less than that nothing can be done

by, to, or with it. Likewise, an actual hundred dollars is

“a-hundred-dollars-that-can-be-spent”. The predicate “actual” or “existent” can simply

have no other signification. But it definitely has this signification.

In considering the OA it will hardly be profitable to attempt a determination of

Anselm’s own initial assumptions and attitudes, i.e. whether his central concern was

rational demonstration, the context of faith, or a direct, perhaps mystical, awareness of

God that precedes any logical acquaintance. With faith and mysticism the scholar can

have nothing to do on their own terms; they are essentially idiotic phenomena, private

and therefore insulated from public scrutiny. Therefore, it is on rational, or

philosophical, grounds that the OA will here be considered.

Once God is defined as the Existent, then of course any denial of its existence

will amount to a verbal and logical contradiction; just so, such an initial definition

constitutes a logical fallacy. If God were initially defined as “that than which a more

visible cannot be conceived” then the statement “God is invisible” would contain a

contradiction. It cannot be said, then, that Anselm is proving – or intending to prove –

God’s existence as if it were a dubious hypothesis which may or may not be true,

depending on how the proof turns out. Instead, Anselm is engaging in a kind of verbal

sabotage by ensuring that no a-theist can articulate his position sensibly and without

contradiction. But of course the existent exists; the whole problem is whether God
belongs to that category. To illustrate this problem, it may profit to consider an

analogous “being”, Santa Claus. Santa Claus may be defined as “A jolly old man who

manufactures and delivers toys to children on Christmas morning and exists.”

According to this definition, one cannot deny the existence of Santa Claus without

contradiction. Nonetheless, the statement “Santa Claus does not exist” is a true one. It

runs counter to the initial definition of Santa Claus but not to actual experience;

therefore, the definition, and not the statement, is flawed. The definition is flawed

because it predicates “existence” of Santa Claus. The problem with the definition is not,

as Hume/Kant thought, that “existence” is not a proper predicate but that it is not

properly applicable to Santa Claus, in precisely the same way that “located in France” is

not properly applicable to Italy. Italy is not in France and Santa Claus does not exist.

(The nature and function of the concept “existence” has already been discussed in

some detail already.) Why is the case of God not as simple? The reason is that, unlike

in the case of Santa Claus, what is in question is not the reality of some isolated entity

which might easily be introduced or withdrawn from the realm of the existent. By

defining God as “that than which a greater (more existent) cannot be conceived” Anselm

has identified God with existence itself, for nothing “more existent” can be conceived

than existence itself. It is impossible for existence not to exist in the same way that it is

impossible for redness not to be red. However, it is possible that Santa Claus does not

exist – even if he is defined as existent – in the same way as it is possible for an apple

to be green, even if it is defined as red. In this case, the initial definition is flawed. As

has been said, “the most existent” is that entity which is most able to influence other
entities and remains most impervious to their (negative) influence. In other words,

“existence” is nothing but power or competence. Thus, God is defined as that than

which a more powerful and competent cannot be conceived. Thus, Guanilo’s request

that Anselm prove God’s existence by an “indubitable” and “most certain” argument

showing that the divine “is actually somewhere” and “exists as a genuine and

undeniably real thing” is precluded and rendered absurd by Anselm’s initial definition of

God. For all intents and purposes, God is identified by Anselm with existence itself.

Existence, of course, is certainly not a thing which might stand in topographical or

geographical relation to other things. As Santayana observed, a comprehensive

inventory of the items of experience would never yield “existence”. Nevertheless, every

item of experience is supposed to “exist”. Thus, searching in this way for God would be

like searching for infinity on a number line, as though infinity were a particular number,

like any other, rather than a characteristic of the whole number line.

The doctrine that existence is a perfection and perfection a measure of existence

is not as problematical as many philosophers have supposed, since “more perfect” or

“greater” means “more influential and less susceptible to influence”. As Spinoza held,

an entity is more perfect, or existent, in direct proportion to its action and in inverse

proportion to its passion, or sufferance. It is not so much a matter of saying, then, that a

house – to use Norman Malcolm’s example – “will be a better house if it exists than if it

does not.” This is to take a subjective and utilitarian satisfaction as the measure of

perfection, which is a mistake. Rather is it a matter of saying that a non-existent house

– or one that exists only as an idea in the mind – is nothing at all to be reckoned with
and is completely at the mercy of the mind’s activity, to which it can offer no resistance.

This is evidently what Anselm meant when he maintained that “It is impossible to

conceive that God is not”. God is that over which the mind may exercise no power and

which resists every effort of the mind to negate it, whether in earnest or at play.

In the face of the OA, the genuine dilemma is not how Anselm can have

supposed himself to have proved the existence of God but how he can have supposed

himself not to have articulated a thorough-going pan-theism.

A very helpful analogy may be drawn between cognition and sensation. In

Anselm’s argument, the presence of an idea to the mind (esse in intellectu, intelligere) is

very much like the presence of an object to the eyes. Of course, to have an optical

experience is not necessarily to see a real object (can what is false be understood?).

Hallucinations, dreams, optical illusions, and plain misunderstandings are classical

evidence of this fact. One may also imagine (conceive) an unreal object or creature – a

unicorn, for instance – perhaps so vividly that it appears tangible and real. Suffice it to

say that the perceived is not at all co-extensive with the real; indeed, if the two realms

overlapped entirely, then the not-perceived would equal the non-real. Furthermore, the

perceivable does not exhaust the real. The important question, whether it is possible

actually to perceive an hallucination, is analogous to the question – posed by Anselm

and Guanilo – whether it is possible to understand a falsehood. One sees visible things

and infers visibility itself from their appearance. One never sees visibility, or the Visible,
itself. To have an object in one’s sights is not sufficient to establish the visibility, or

reality, of the object; if it were, then the objects of hallucinations, dreams, optical

illusions, misunderstandings, and vain imaginings would all be as real as anything else.

Further experience of the object, of an altogether different nature from sight, is required

to establish its reality. Generally speaking, the same is true of cognitions. Possession

of the idea of a thing is never sufficient to establish the reality of that thing. Further

experience, of an altogether different order from cognition, is required to establish the

reality of the thing. Anselm argues that this is not so in the case of God – or “that than

which nothing greater can be conceived”. The possession of this bare idea alone

guarantees the reality of its ideatum; nothing further is required to establish the

existence of God (so defined) than the apprehension of the mere thought of him. This is

tantamount to seeing the existence, or visibility, of a thing, of seeing not only the object

but also its reality. (Expound and develop this analogy, there is more…)

The existence of anything, therefore, can be “established” merely by posing the

question, “If it does not exist then how could I possibly conceive of it or define it?” It is

not in the nature of the non-existent to be conceived, just as it is not in the nature of the

invisible to be seen. But the existent is a larger category than the perceivable and a

smaller category than the conceivable.

There are two entities so very intimately bound up with every person’s existence

that they are not often really noticed by him, which answer quite well to the conception
of God and stand in unique relation to that particular notion. These entities are the Sum

and the Self. Nothing comes to the mind more easily – and, indeed, inevitably – than

these two propositions. In the final analysis, as shall be demonstrated, they are quite

identical and are distinguished only by a provision of the imagination. Together they

constitute the true “normal object of the mind’s belief”; the conception of God is borne of

this nexus, a messy partisan extrapolation. (?)

The Sum is certainly no very difficult proposition. Its reality and supposition are

signified by the words “everything”, “all”, “total”, etc, as also by the concepts “infinity”

and “eternity” which together comprise the notion of Necessity. That the mind cannot

paint for itself an accurate picture of this entity or formulate a definite conception of it is

no impediment to the necessary supposition of its necessary existence. To express the

matter rather crudely, “Any” implies “All”. Because the positive existence of sheer

Nothingness is – and presumably will always be – inconceivable to the highest degree

(because at the very least there must exist a Self to perceive Nothingness, which is

absurd), the Very Least will always imply the Very Most. The number 1 can never stand

alone but must carry within itself, so to speak, the implication of infinity. The logical,

psychological, and empirical impossibility of Nothingness guarantees the automatic

postulation of Necessity by the mind. Nothing more needs be said – or can be said –

concerning the Necessarily Existent than that it is, just as infinity need not nor can be

counted to before it is postulated. It is implicit in the number 1.

The whole trouble is that men have always been inclined to regard the Sum as

they would any other object of their experience. Nothing, however, could be more
absurd or less profitable. Once possessed, the conception precludes absolutely every

attempt to move beyond it in search of causal explanation. Evidently, nothing can

subsist beside or apart from the Sum, to which the latter might stand in causal relation.

Here is the great weakness of all those demonstrations of God’s existence from

principles of causality or motion. The Sum does not admit of causal explanation

because nothing subsists, except itself, of which it might be the effect. Also, to regard

the Sum as needful or capable of causal explanation is to beg the question, that is, to

assume what has yet to be proved. For if the Sum were capable of causal explanation

then it would not be the Sum but merely the Sum minus its cause. Nevertheless, the

very idea of “the world” or “the universe” precludes any attempt to assign a cause to it.

Nor will it suffice to postulate some power or principality that transcends “the world” or

“the universe”; for the only conception which the mind can neither supplement nor

discount – in earnest or at play – is that of the Sum, which precludes automatically the

conception of any power or principality transcending it. Infinity can be infinitely added

to, only to wind up back at infinity, no more and no less (?).

The wonder of Anselm’s argument is not that he can have imagined himself to

have demonstrated the existence of God. The demonstration is without flaw and

appeals to the most automatic assumptions of the mature mind, foolish or otherwise.

The wonder of the argument is that Anselm should have failed to follow his own

argument into a thorough-going pan-theism. For if God is “that than which a greater

cannot be conceived” then God is nothing else but the Sum. “That than which a greater

cannot be coneived” is ipso facto that than which nothing other can be conceived. If
“that than which a greater cannot be conceived” is infinite and eternal – that is,

necessarily existent – then nothing can exist except it, unless it be granted that some

place there might be where the infinite is not or some time when the eternal is not,

which is absurd. Anselm, of course, could not come to this because this is pan-theism.

All of the classical contradictions of theology, which have been the playthings of

pusillanimous dialecticians all these centuries long, are borne of the primordial tension

between, or within, the Self and the Sum.

It will perhaps be well to consider this formula in itself, apart from its truth content

or its role in the argument. In the first place, as Barth has pointed out, Anselm applies

this formula to God so that it functions very much like a name, or a definition. Here,

again, the somewhat arbitrary and polemical nature of the argument is evident. As has

been said, it is hardly sensible to suppose that Anselm is trying either to bolster

anyone’s moribund faith or to convince any unbeliever of God’s existence. Instead, he

is attempting, by defining “God” in a certain way (giving it a certain name), to preclude

the a-theist from stating his position (“There is no God”) without logical contradiction.

The following propositions are perfectly sensible, in themselves: “There is no creator of

the world”; “There is no savior of mankind”; “There is no omnipotent, omnibenevolent

being”. These propositions could be true. The same cannot be said of the proposition,

“That than which nothing greater cannot be conceived is an illusion and exists only in

the mind.” However, the equivalent statement, “There is nothing than which nothing

greater can be conceived” is not so vulnerable to objection. To it the Anselmian

interlocutor would most likely reply: “Then whence the conception of that than which a

greater cannot be conceived? You bear the idea in your mind, which is equivalent to a

judgment of the real existence of its ideatum.” At this point it will help to consider the

rather remarkable cogency of this type of argument. The person who wanted to

demonstrate the existence of unicorns could pose this formidable challenge: “If unicorns

do not exist then how is it possible that anyone should bear the idea of a unicorn in his

mind? Surely it is impossible to conceive of the absolutely non-existent. Unicorns,

then, must exist ​in some sense.​ ” To illustrate the same point more forcefully, from the

argument from gradation – on which the OA to some extent depends – the positive

existence of absolute Nothingness follows as inevitably as the existence of the “most

perfect being”. (Other papers). Enter here the problem of whether existence is a

predicate. (Quote from James’ Psychology) A person will believe whatever is 1)

imagined by him to be pertinent and 2) is not contradicted by the sum of his

pre-established beliefs. Now, the existence of unicorns is strictly speaking not positively

contradicted by any other belief; it is merely not supported by any other belief or set of

beliefs. People do not disbelieve in unicorns because they possess any substantial

evidence of their non-existence – evidence of non-existence is an absurd notion – but

because whether unicorns exist or not makes no odds. Until unicorns or their absence

become considerably more conspicuous than at present, the argument is frankly

irrelevant.

In this very real sense, then, the existence of an object is always present

implicitly in the idea of that object, as being the only possible cause of the idea itself. In
another sense, however, “existence” is a term applied by the mind to some of its

contents and denied by it to others, depending on the degree of control which the mind

is able safely to exercise over a given idea. The real difference, for instance, between a

horse and a unicorn – the reason that the former is said to exist while the latter is said

not to – is that a person can think and act as if unicorns do not exist without loss, while if

he thought and acted as if unicorns existed he would presumably sacrifice something

valuable, e.g., the esteem of his family and friends. The opposite is true of horses. The

idea of a unicorn is feeble and contrived; the idea of a horse, on the other hand, is quite

spontaneous and forceful. The relation between the mind and its idea, in the former

case, is entirely unilateral; the mind never conceives of itself as suffering – or as

capable of suffering – the action of a unicorn. It only acts on that idea by calling it forth

or putting it away. At this point, it will be noticed, the question of the mind’s relation to

some “external world” is set aside, the former constituting a quite extraneous – and

even egregious – proposition.

Anselm accomplishes his purpose but only at great, and perhaps even fatal, cost.

For let it be granted that God’s non-existence (as God is defined, or named, by Anselm)

cannot be professed without contradiction. God exists, then. The great question now to

be posed to the Anselmian interlocutor is, Quid ergo? So what? What difference can it

possibly make whether “that than which a greater cannot be conceived” exists or not?

The conception cannot possibly come to bear on anyone’s thought process unless, of

course, it is linked to the Judao-Christian-Islamic God, which cannot be accomplished

without the abandonment of all pretense to logical integrity. An analogy will be helpful
here. An orphan knows that his biological parents exist. However, nothing very

substantial prevents him from assuming that he simply materialized out of a void. His

parents exist for him only as a kind of logical necessity; his parents are, for him, nothing

more than a necessary inference from the premises a) he exists and b) people do not

materialize out of voids but are products of sexual unions between pre-existing men and

women. A question must be seriously posed, which is tremendously important to the

OA: For the orphan, does the statement “My parents exist” constitute anything more

than an empty verbal-logical formula? By the account of existence provided above, it

does not. The boy’s relationship to this idea is entirely unilateral; because it is not tied

to any spontaneous and forceful idea, he may discard this idea without loss. In the very

same way, a person sitting on the toilet at noon may disregard the idea of a balloon

without loss; insofar as he is doing what he is doing at the time that he is doing it, the

balloon is as good as non-existent. At this point, the crux, and perhaps the origin, of the

notion of existence have been found. For the reason that objects of ideas are thought

to exist, although there is no immediate loss involved in the assumption of their

non-existence, is that the possibility of such potential loss in the future must be taken

into account. The distinction, then, between the existent and the non-existent (or the

real and the non-real) is between those entities that must, now or in the future, be taken

into account as impinging themselves upon the Self.

Because this idea of “that than which a greater cannot be conceived” does not

contain any moral, or practical, principle, its value to the philosophical, religious, and

moral sensibilities is negligible. Its only value, in fact, is that which Anselm gives it, i.e.
as a dialectical trump-card to be played against “the fool”, i.e., the atheist. The idea has

a label, of course, but it contains nothing positive or determinate; it is very similar, in

fact, to “the Inconceivable”, a category whose contents are necessarily unavailable. In

an attempt to make sense of Anselm’s conception of God, it is helpful to perform a

thought-experiment and actually try to conceive of “that than which a greater cannot be

conceived”, rather than simply reciting the formula. One may start very small and begin

by conceiving of a simple stone. Immediately, it is evident that the search for something

that is better – and not simply bigger, stronger, or more pleasing – than this stone is

beset by bewildering complications. What is better than this particular stone and why?

The biological standard provided above may be accepted for the present. A dog is

better than a stone because a dog is better able to exercise an influence on entities not

itself and better able to resist their influence. A stone is inert and must suffer whatever

is done to it by some being more active than itself. (Already the specter of

Thrasymachus and the Athenians and the Melian conference are rising with their

indefeasible “Might is right!”) Now a man may be conceived and judged to be better

than a dog, by this same standard of degrees of control over self and environment. The

going has been easy thus far: a man is greater than a dog, which is greater than a

stone. At this point, however, the way becomes more difficult. What conceivable entity

is more able to influence its environment, while remaining less pervious to its influence,

than even the strongest and most intelligent human being? Evidently, the answer is not

to be found in any particular item or class of items within the natural order. The problem

is complicated still further when one tries to actually conceive of “that than which
nothing greater can be conceived”. That conception is not at all clear. Certainly, it can

mean nothing more to the religious sensibility than Infinity can mean to a child who is

counting up apples. Indeed, this raises a very interesting, and perhaps even edifying,

analogy with number. A conception such as “that number to which no further numbers

can be added” is evidently ridiculous. No matter how inconceivably large the number,

one may be added to it. It may well be true, then, that “that than which nothing greater

can be conceived” is, itself, inconceivable, just as Infinity is inconceivable, although it is

nameable. Infinity is not a number in itself but an expression indicative of the

innumerable, or endless, nature of numbers. At the same time, it is indicative of the

inconceivability both of endlessness and of a termination of the series of numbers. 1,

2,3,4,5 … carries with it the implication of Infinity, which is itself not indicative of any

actual quantity but of the constant implication of further quantity, of ​more​. Anselm’s

argument – as well as many other arguments for the existence of God – is of a

mathematical nature insofar as it assumes and deals with a scale of values (“by

ascending from lesser goods to greater goods”) which is not inherent in the natural

order but is a complex tool imposed upon that order by the intellect. Numbers do not

exist; quantities of things exist. Numbers are tools by which the mind deals effectively

with quantities. (The nature of tools has been discussed.) Infinity, then, is

simultaneously the provisional termination of the number-series as well as the

insistence on its interminable nature. In the very same way, God (as defined by

Anselm) should perhaps not be regarded as a definite being but as a constant

implication of being and an insistence on the inconceivability of Nothingness.

 And why is Nothingness inconceivable? Because Nothingness would involve the

annihilation of the Self, i.e., the conceiver.

Anselm himself (and subsequently many others) chided Guanilo when the latter

spoke of “the greatest of all beings” as if it were identical with “that than which a greater

cannot be conceived”. In truth, that the two are indeed identical is easily recognized by

anyone not easily beguiled by verbal legerdemain. A greater than the greatest of all

beings can obviously not be conceived unless “the conceived” is identical with “the real”,

in which case disputes over what is real and what is not are useless. For let the

greatest of all beings first be conceived. Because it is conceived (defined) as a being it

is ipso facto an extramental reality. Now, let some thing greater than it be conceived;

the thing is impossible because, by Anselm’s own lights, what exists outside the mind is,

for that fact, greater than what exists only in the mind (as an idea). But the conception

of the greatest of all beings cannot be made actually greater by the mere imagining of

ought else being added to it, for the resulting conception exists only in the mind and

cannot, therefore, be actually greater than the initial “greatest of all things”. The latter

is, therefore, identical with “that than which a greater cannot be conceived.”

The historical point at which the most important and controversial fact concerning

God became its existence, rather than its disposition, demands, desires, etc., can

probably not be determined with any precision. Rational criticism of theology – that is,
the abandonmentt and/or renunciation of theological assumptions – is at least as old as

Xenophanes and is, of course, present all through the Sophists, Plato, and Aristotle.

The significance of Nietzsche’s much later pronouncement, “God is dead!” is to be

found in the fact that by the nineteenth century it was no longer possible for theology to

remain uncritical of itself, unconscious of itself. Theology has degenerated quite

irretrievably into theodicy; all faith is bad faith. All of this, of course, is the result of the

transformation of the criterion of truth into impregnability of argument, which has here

been referred to as the deracination of experience. Anselm’s OA constitutes perhaps

the zenith of this progression. One of the most significant patterns detectable in that

progression is that the value of a conception of God for the religious and moral

sensibilities varies inversely to the rational content and form of the conception.

Common to every religious conception of divinity is that the latter is more

competent than humankind and is concerned with the behavior of entities.

Omnipotence, unity, and well-defined and invariable moral attitudes are not common to

every religious conception of deity. The gods of philosophy tend, of course, to be much

less personal and idiosyncratic. While religion characterizes its deities analogically and

anthropologically – maker, father, king, shepherd, lover, etc. – philosophy does not

characterize deity at all but rests quite content with some abstract first, or ultimate,

principle. Complications ensue when these two types of theology collide and attempts

are made to reconcile them one to the other. The high tide of this attempt was reached,

of course, by Thomas Aquinas, preceded by Aquinas and Anselm et al. and succeeded
by Descartes and Spinoza et al. The primary complication lies in the fact that

personhood, or charisma, is incompatible with those claims made for the first principle.

An infinite or eternal or omnipotent person is not a sensible notion. The origins, both

chronological and existential, of the three types of theology are worth examining.

A charismatic (personal) god cannot survive the clash of cultures precisely

because personhood involves mutability as well as active influence. Apart from society

personhood is not possible; it is certainly an inconceivable notion. The essence of

personhood consists of the capacities both to change and to be changed. This is also

the primary requirement for continuance. Those entities that fall lowest on the scale of

competence – one may think of a stone – are those that are least capable of effecting

change in other entities or of voluntarily effecting change in themselves at the instigation

of their environment. Here is the explanation of the fact that charismatic gods are in

constant flux. Confrontations between cultures, as between persons, always result in

measures of mutual resistance and assimilation; charismatic gods are not exempt from

this process because they, too, are items of culture. Evidence for this needs hardly be

adduced; the transformations and exchanges of gods by and between their several

native cultures, when those cultures encounter one another, are familiar to even the

most casual student of history, both ancient and modern. The most fiercely partisan of

these traditions – the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic – have tried to explain these

adjustments and adaptations of God as new (and, of course, always final) revelations.

Antiquity, of course, is rife with charismatic theology. However, to scour modern

thought for epistemic theology would be a mistake. The reason for this is that the

Judao-Christian god – the charismatic deity par excellence – has been introduced into

the farthest corners and deepest recesses of the collective Western mind and spirit, so

that since the time of Paul no theology has appeared that does not begin with that

figure. It is in the pre-Pauline theologies that the charismatic and epistemic theological

types are found in a pure state, unmixed each with the other. It is true that the

pre-Socratics, Plato, and even Aristotle were not entirely free of the influence of the

charismatic theology articulated by Homer and Hesiod and embodied in popular

festivals, cults, and mystery religions. Nevertheless, it is evident that the Pre-Socratic

philosophers and Aristotle did not begin with the gods of charismatic poesy and religion

but with naked experience and observation; their theologies constituted more

unadulterated processes of reasoning. As shall be shown, Plato produced a body of

work in which the relations between the charismatic and epistemic types is thoroughly

ambiguous and complex; this, it shall be argued, is due primarily to the unique natures

of Athens and of Plato himself.

Charismatic theology antedates the epistemic variety by many thousands of

years. The burial sites and cave drawings of proto- and early hominids contain no

discernible specifically theistic elements, and their religious status is debatable. The

ancient religions of Mesopotamia, the Near East, and Africa are clearly and thoroughly

charismatic in that Ultimacy was experienced and articulated as personhood, in contrast

to that process of reasoning leading to a non-personal abstract principle which

characterizes epistemic theology, the historical genesis of which is to be provisionally

located at Thales and which achieved its mature and pure state in Aristotle and certain

of the Stoic thinkers.

It is highly unlikely that the concurrence of democracy and epistemic theology –

both absolutely unique in the ancient world – is without immense significance for the

subject at hand. This concurrence suggests that the gods of a culture are decisively

causally related to that culture’s modes of interaction and regulation. The precise order,

or direction, of causation is of rather difficult determination. That hypothesis which

demands least of the critical intellect and the historical imagination is to be presumed.

All things considered, it is more likely that modes of interaction and regulation give rise

to theology than the converse. (Marx and Weber debate…)

We can only mean by “existence” that things of which it may be predicated are

perceived to be spontaneously, consistently, and forcibly present to consciousness as

forces to be reckoned with; all of this may be resolved into this formula, i.e. the existent

is that at the hands of which we might suffer, or by which we may be acted on. The

difference, then, between a unicorn and a butterfly is that a person’s relationship with a

unicorn is of a unilateral kind; that is, he acts on the unicorn (conceiving of it or

annihilating the conception of it) but cannot suffer its action. Matters are otherwise with

a butterfly. This is what I mean when I say “spontaneous and forcible” (the meaning of

“consistent” I will lay out anon). The idea of a unicorn does not arise spontaneously but

by a contrivance applied to the minds of youths by their elders; if not for this

contrivance, a person would live long indeed, and perhaps forever, without the idea of a
unicorn. The idea of a butterfly, on the other hand, is quite spontaneous and needs no

contrivance to gain admittance to the mind; the latter needs only once suffer the gentle

impingement of an actual butterfly. All of this is to say nothing more than that the

existent is a smaller category than the conceivable. For many things may be conceived,

but their presence to the mind is owed not to any action of their own but solely to the

action and contrivance of the mind upon itself and certain of its own contents.

We have now articulated that philosophy, which is first and last, the be-all and

end-all of human existence and experience, in which all other existence is

encompassed. The conclusions there reached are incontestable; they are the first

premises and final conclusions of Mind itself and cannot be objected to except by

passion and vested interest, which themselves serve no interest whatever and are to no

end but their own existence. In this they are identical with Reality itself (?)

It remains now to consider humankind in light of this, its only philosophy, safely

assuming that there is nothing to humankind but what follows from that body of

conclusions; that is, there is nothing substantial to mankind but what they share with all

other things. For mankind, too, is nothing more than another provisional distinction of

Need into entities of various degrees of various attributes (?). The task that we have set

before ourselves is an Anthropology, a science of man, and the science of anything is

nothing but the discernment and enumeration of its arsenal and strategies for the

satisfaction of the Need which it essentially is. It must be true of human beings, for it is

true of all things, that they undertake nothing but what they suppose – consciously or
unconsciously – to be of advantage to themselves. (This rule and its universality are, as

we have seen, by no means nullified by the existence of inanimate objects, i.e. stones,

which never act but only suffer, for every action is a supposition and every supposition

an action. It may not, then, be said of rocks, e.g. that they disprove this law, in that they

do not always act as they suppose is advantageous to themselves; being incapable of

action they are incapable of supposition and therefore also incapable of

disadvantageous supposition.)

The questions, then, to be asked of any action whatever of any human being

whatever, are as follows. First, for what reason does this person suppose that the

action will benefit him? Second, will this action actually benefit him? These questions

must, of course, be posed only after it is decided what kind of motion it is, that is,

whether it is an action at all, and not a sufferance. For all motion, as we have seen, is

of one or the other of these two kinds. For it makes no sense at all to ask such

questions of every motion indiscriminately, without first deciding if the motion in question

is active or passive. The reader will recall the rule set down in the first book, i.e. that a

motion is said to be active only insofar as it is of advantage to the agent, whereas, if it is

to the agent’s disadvantage, it is said to be passive. For no entity acts in a manner that

is harmful to itself; if harm accrues to it, that is not by any action or supposition of its

own but by the action of some other entity upon the first, which is then said to suffer. It

will be remembered, also, that in respect of itself, every entity is at all times both active

and passive. It cannot act without suffering at its own hands. But if this self-inflicted

suffering is to the agent’s benefit, then it is said to be active. A vixen, for instance,
whose paw is in the trap is said to act and not to suffer when she gnaws through her leg

in order to free herself. A human being, on the other hand, is said to suffer and not to

act when he turns the gun upon himself; far from killing himself, such a person has been

annihilated by another.

That those who join it must be men is at once the greatest advantage and the

direst detriment to the cause of a science of Man. For, on the one hand, with nothing

else are men in such intimate and constant converse; on the other hand, precisely that

intimacy and constancy must surely result in a near-sightedness that will severely

retard, if not totally cripple, any attempt at an Anthropology. A non-human

anthropologist would certainly describe and interpret human behavior in terms

unacceptably simplistic and mechanistic, without regard for those momentous mental

acts and crucial nuances that men, themselves, deem the greater part of their riches.

Certainly most, and probably all, of what men would recognize as causal factors and

motive forces of their behavior takes place in the closets and basement-rooms of the

mind, quite outside the empirical scientist’s proper purview. Also, in respect of

themselves, a chasm is always liable to yawn between what men actually believe and

what they say, as well as between what they say and what is actually true. That this will

be a vexation to any anthropologist is evidenced in the most successful (?) attempts yet

made at such a science; it is everywhere implicit in Darwinian theory and everywhere

explicit in Marxian and Freudian theory.

 Reason, in its unadulterated use, will inevitably lead a person to conclusions

which the rest of his constitution rails violently against.

The solution of the Reflexion Problem has been rendered possible by that most

tremendous and subtle intellectual shift, which has here been styled the deracination of

experience. That solution consists in the recognition of the naked skeleton of the form

of human experience; it is accomplished by the mutual and complete canceling-out of

superfluous racial elements until only the bare form of experience remains. That form

shall be nothing less than the perennial and primordial – the true, the only – philosophy.

Universal Account consists, then, not in ad hoc speculation sprung from religious

sentiment or scientific brutishness but in the recognition of what all human beings alike

must assume and believe to be true, if they are to persist in an existence so gratuitously

given.

The Reflexion Problem: The mind cannot be known until the capacity of the mind to

know is known. However, the capacity of the mind to know cannot be known until the

mind is known. If a alone implies b and if b alone implies a, then neither a nor b can be

known with any certainty.

A large part of the problem, in regard to the rational demonstration of the

Existence of God, is that nearly every thinker to wrestle with it has done so according to

an antecedent tacit conception of God as an object, as a sort of Magnified Thing. One

may hope that, if these men and women had cared to recognize and examine this
antecedent implicit assumption, they would have dismissed it posthaste. For God is, at

the very least, Infinite and Eternal. But an Infinite and/or Eternal Thing is a manifest

absurdity. For a Thing, in order even to be talked about, must be defined, however

broadly, and nothing can be more inimical to definition than Infinitude, or to Infinitude

than definition. Therefore, if one commences with thoughts such as these: “I will

hypothesize an Infinite, Eternal, Omnipotent, and Omniscient Thing; then I will try to

determine whether or not this Thing exists”, then it can be no cause for wonder that one

is thrown before long into vain paroxysms of cogitation and riddle-me-thats. An Infinite

Thing is an oxymoron, non-existent by definition. As an example of the kind of absurdity

into which such assumptions lead, we may take a famous quip of Bertrand Russell’s.

Asked what he would have to say for himself upon arrival at the Pearly Gates, Lord

Russell replied, “I would say, ‘Oh, Good Lord, why did you not give us more evidence?’”

Now, it might well be wondered what a person of Lord Russell’s ilk would regard as

sufficient “evidence” of the Existence of God, if the Bare Fact of Being does not suffice.

Would such a man like to touch God, or see God, or measure God, or predict and verify

God, or mathematically demonstrate God? Then let him only touch the object nearest

himself; let him close his eyes; let him add two to four and make six; let him do anything

his heart desires, but let him also know that he does nothing but what it is given him

from Above to do. By this is meant only that God is so tremendously in evidence that

anyone who demands “more evidence” of it is like a minnow that would hold the sea in

its mouth. Of whom or what did Lord Russell imagine himself to be talking? A person

or a thing like any other? Some humanoid entity, situated in space-time, whose
existence might be observed or inferred? Perhaps he envisaged a feeble old man with

a gray beard and clothed in raiment of purest white! Only such a puerile conception of

God would provoke such a puerile attitude as Lord Russell’s. Now, it must be conceded

that such people take their cues from popular theology, which has always insensibly

provided for its own ridicule. But an intellect like Lord Russell’s, otherwise so fertile and

sapient, ought not only to have recognized the absurdity of popular theology, but also to

have recognized the reality of which the former is a gross parody. Lord Russell’s quip

has brought sardonic smiles to the faces of many a-theists. But whoever demands

“more evidence” of God’s existence asks what cannot be given not because God does

not exist but because the Truth cannot be reduced to a parody of itself in order to satisfy

the sensibilities of a clown.

It will be well to briefly examine the assumptions of such militant men of science.

They will have truck only with “proofs” (or, to use their own vocabulary, “relative degrees

of likelihood”). But to prove any proposition, one must also – if one is to be properly

scientific – demand a proof of the proof. With this, however, the respectable logician

cannot sit content but must demand a proof of the proof of the proof, as well as a proof

of the proof of the proof of the proof, until finally the whole question is rendered moot by

exhaustion, insanity, or death. The point is that the demand for proof must be relaxed if

one is ever to believe anything.