eally nothing of
weight; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely
perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we can
conclude nothing. With greater justice, however, we
may say, that of such terms as perfection and existence
we know too little to speculate in this way. Existence
may be an imperfection for all we can tell; we know
nothing about the matter. Such arguments are but endless
petilianes principii, like the self-devouring serpent
resolving themselves into nothing. We wander round
and round them, in the hope of finding some tangible
point at which we can seize their meaning; but we
are presented everywhere with the same impracticable
surface, from which our grasp glides off ineffectual.

The idea, however, lying at the bottom of the conviction,
which obviously Spinoza felt upon the matter,
is stated with 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 solely from the confused
habits of our own minds.

It may seem to some persons 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 this logic, it may lead us out
to some unexpected consequences. Obviously 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 b