straction from it of its incommensurable or
irrational element, its vital essence. Thus the God of feeling, the
divinity felt as a unique person and consciousness external to us,
although at the same time enveloping and sustaining us, was converted
into the idea of God.

The logical, rational God, the _ens summum_, the _primum movens_, the
Supreme Being of theological philosophy, the God who is reached by the
three famous ways of negation, eminence and causality, _viae negationis,
eminentiae, causalitatis_, is nothing but an idea of God, a dead thing.
The traditional and much debated proofs of his existence are, at bottom,
merely a vain attempt to determine his essence; for as Vinet has very
well observed, existence is deduced from essence; and to say that God
exists, without saying what God is and how he is, is equivalent to
saying nothing at all.

And this God, arrived at by the methods of eminence and negation or
abstraction of finite qualities, ends by becoming an unthinkable God, a
pure idea, a God of whom, by the very fact of his ideal excellence, we
can say that he is nothing, as indeed he has been defined by Scotus
Erigena: _Deus propter excellentiam non inmerito nihil vocatur_. Or in
the words of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in his fifth Epistle,
"The divine darkness is the inaccessible light in which God is said to
dwell." The anthropomorphic God, the God who is felt, in being purified
of human, and as such finite, relative and temporal, attributes,
evaporates into the God of deism or of pantheism.

The traditional so-called proofs of the existence of God all refer to
this God-Idea, to this logical God, the God by abstraction, and hence
they really prove nothing, or rather, they prove nothing more than the
existence of this idea of God.

In my early youth, when first I began to be puzzled by these eternal
problems, I read in a book, the author of which I have no wish to
recall,[39] this sentence: "God is the great X placed over the ultimate
barrier of human knowledge; in the measure in which science advances,
the barrier recedes." And I wrote in the margin, "On this side of the
barrier, everything is explained without Him; on the further side,
nothing is explained, either with Him or without Him; God therefore is
superfluous." And so far as concerns the God-Idea, the God of the
proofs, I continue to be of the same opinion. Laplace is said to have
stated that he had not found the hypothesis of God n