nite. The image of God is so
impressed by him upon us, that we "conceive that resemblance wherein
the idea of God is contained by the same faculty whereby we are
conscious of ourselves." In other words, our consciousness of
ourselves is at the same time consciousness of our finitude, and hence
of our relation to a being who is infinite.

The principle which underlies the reasoning of Descartes is that to be
conscious of a limit, is to transcend it. We could not feel the limits
either upon our thought or upon our existence, we could not doubt or
desire, if we did not already apprehend something beyond these limits.
Nay, we could not be conscious of our existence as individual selves
if we were not conscious of that which is not ourselves, and of a
unity in which both self and not-self are included. Our individual
life is therefore to us as self-conscious beings a part of a wider
universal life. Doubt and aspiration are but the manifestation of this
essential division and contradiction of a nature which, as conscious
of itself, is at the same time conscious of the whole in which it is a
part. And as the existence of a self and its consciousness are one, so
we may say that a thinking being is not only an individual, but always
in some sense identified with that universal unity of being to which
it is essentially related.

If Descartes had followed out this line of thought, he would have been
led at once to the pantheism of Spinoza, if not beyond it. As it is,
he is on the verge of contradiction with himself when he speaks of the
consciousness of God as _in some sense_ prior to the consciousness of
self. How can anything be prior to the first principle of knowledge?
It is no answer to say that the consciousness of God is the
_principium essendi_, while the consciousness of self is the
_principium cognoscendi_. For, if the idea of God is prior to the idea
of self, knowledge must begin where existence begins, with God. The
words "in some sense," with which Descartes qualifies his assertion of
the priority of the idea of God, only betray his hesitation and his
partial consciousness of the contradiction in which he is involved.
Some of Descartes's critics presented this difficulty to him in
another form, and accused him of reasoning in a circle when he said
that it is because God cannot lie that we are certain that our clear
and distinct ideas do not decei