th sufficient
distinctness in one of his letters. 'Nothing is more clear,' he writes
to his pupil De Vries, 'than that, on the one hand, everything which
exists is conceived by or under some attribute or other; that the more
reality, therefore, a being or thing has, the more attributes must be
assigned to it;' 'and conversely' (and this he calls his _argumentum
palmarium_ in proof of the existence of God), '_the more attributes I
assign to a thing, the more I am forced to conceive it as existing_.'
Arrange the argument how we please, we shall never get it into a form
clearer than this:--The more perfect a thing is, the more it must exist
(as if existence could admit of more or less); and therefore the
all-perfect Being must exist absolutely. There is no flaw, we are told,
in the reasoning; and if we are not convinced, it is from the confused
habits of our own minds.

Some persons may think that all arguments are good when on the right
side, and that it is a gratuitous impertinence to quarrel with the
proofs of a conclusion which it is so desirable that all should receive.
As yet, however, we are but inadequately acquainted with the idea
attached by Spinoza to the word perfection; and if we commit ourselves
to his logic, it may lead us out to unexpected consequences. All such
reasonings presume, as a first condition, that we men possess faculties
capable of dealing with absolute ideas; that we can understand the
nature of things external to ourselves as they really _are_ in their
absolute relation to one another, independent of our own conception. The
question immediately before us is one which can never be determined. The
truth which is to be proved is one which we already believe; and if, as
we believe also, our conviction of God's existence is, like that of our
own existence, intuitive and immediate, the grounds of it can never
adequately be analysed; we cannot say exactly what they are, and
therefore we cannot say what they are not. Whatever we receive
intuitively, we receive without proof; and stated as a naked
proposition, it must involve a _petitio principii_. We have a right,
however, to object at once to an argument in which the conclusion is
more obvious than the premises; and if it lead on to other consequences
which we disapprove in themselves, we reject it without difficulty or
hesitation. We ourselves believe that God is, because we experience the
control of a 'power' which is stronger than we; and our inst