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GENERAL SUEVET. 11
sea quid ipsa ejus naturce immensitas est CAUSA, SIVE RATIO,
propter quam nulla causa indiget ad existendum. Ke ought
to have said : The immensity of God is a logical reason
from which it follows, that Grod needs no cause ; whereas
he confounds the two together and obviously has no clear
consciousness of the difference between reason and cause.
Properly speaking however, it is his intention which mars
his insight. For here, where the law of causality demands
a cause, he substitutes a reason instead of it, because the
latter, unlike the former, does not immediately lead to
something beyond it ; and thus, by means of this very
axiom, he clears the way to the Ontological Proof of the
existence of G-od, which was really his invention, for Anselm
had only indicated it in a general manner. Immediately
after these axioms, of which I have just quoted the first,
there comes a formal, quite serious statement of the Onto
logical Proof, which, in fact, already lies within that axiom,
as the chicken does within the egg that has been long
brooded over. Thus, while everything else stands in need
of a cause for its existence, the immensitas implied in the
conception of the Deity who is introduced to us upon the
ladder of the Cosmological Proof suffices in lieu of a
cause or, as the proof itself expresses it : in conceptu entis
summe perfecti existentia necessaria continetur. This, then,
is the sleight-of-hand trick, for the sake of which the con
fusion, familiar even to Aristotle, of the two principal
meanings of the principle of sufficient reason, has been
used directly in majorem Dei gloriam.
Considered by daylight, however, and without prejudice,
this famous Ontological Proof is really a charming joke.
On some occasion or other, some one excogitates a con
ception, composed out of all sorts of predicates, among which
however he takes care to include the predicate actuality or
existence, either openly stated or wrapped up for decency s
sake in some other predicate, such as perfectio, immensitas,