sciousness of the individual self, but in
a sense in which the consciousness of self is identical with the
consciousness of God.

Descartes, however, is far from a clear apprehension of the ultimate
unity of thought and being, which nevertheless he strives to find in
God. Beginning with an absolute separation of the _res cogitans_ from
the _res extensa_, he is continually falling back into dualism just
when he seemed to have escaped from it. Even in God the absolute
unity, idea and reality fall asunder; our idea of God is not God in
us, it is only an idea of which God's existence is the cause. But the
category of causality, if it forms a bridge between different things,
as here between knowing and being, at the same time repels them from
each other. It is a category of external relation which may be
adequate to express the relation of the finite to the finite, but not
the relation of the finite to the infinite. We cannot conceive God as
the cause of our idea of him, without making God a purely objective
and therefore finite existence. Nor is the case better when we turn to
the so-called ontological argument,--that existence is necessarily
involved in the idea of God, just as the property of having its angles
equal to two right angles is involved in the idea of a triangle. If
indeed we understood this as meaning that thought transcends the
distinction between itself and existence, and that therefore existence
cannot be a thing in itself out of thought, but must be an
intelligible world that exists as such only for the thinking being,
there is some force in the argument. But this meaning we cannot find
in Descartes, or to find it we must make him inconsistent with
himself. He was so far from having quelled the phantom "thing in
itself," that he treated matter in space as such a thing, and thus
confused externality of space with externality to the mind. On this
dualistic basis, the ontological argument becomes a manifest
paralogism, and lies open to all the objections that Kant brought
against it. That the idea of God involves existence, proves only that
God, if he exists at all, exists by the necessity of his being. But
the link that shall bind thought to existence is still wanting, and,
in consistency with the other presuppositions of Descartes, it cannot
be supplied.

But again, even if we allow to Descartes that God is the unity of
thought and