“return to God” which ascetic philosophy may bring about cannot be a social reform, a transition to some better form of natural existence in a promised land, a renovated earth, or a material or temporal heaven.  Nor can the error of creation be corrected violently by a second arbitrary act, such as suicide, or the annihilation of the universe by some ultimate general collapse.  If such events happen, they still leave the door open to new creations and fresh errors.  But the marvel is (I will return to this point presently) that the world, in the person of a human individual endowed with reason, may perceive the error of its ways and correct it ideally, in the sphere of estimation and worship.  Such is the only possible salvation.  Reason, in order to save us, and we, in order to be saved, must both subsist:  we must both be incidents in the existing world.  We may then, by the operation of reason in us, recover our allegiance to the infinite, for we are bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh:  and by our secret sympathy with it we may rescind every particular claim and dismiss silently every particular form of being, as something unreal and unholy.

An even more cogent reason why M. Benda’s God cannot have been the creator of the world is that avowedly this God has never existed.  We are expressly warned that “if God is infinite Being he excludes existence, in so far as to exist means to be distinct.  In the sense which everybody attaches to the word existence, God, as I conceive him, does not exist”.  Of course, in the mind of a lover of the infinite, this fact is not derogatory to God, but derogatory to existence.  The infinite remains the first and the ultimate term in thought, the fundamental dimension common to all things, however otherwise they may be qualified; it remains the eternal background against which they all are defined and into which they soon disappear.  Evidently, in this divine—­because indestructible and necessary—­dimension, Being is incapable of making choices, adopting paths of evolution, or exercising power; it knows nothing of phenomena; it is not their cause nor their sanction.  It is incapable of love, wrath, or any other passion.  “I will add”, writes M. Benda, “something else which theories of an impersonal deity have less often pointed out.  Since infinity is incompatible with personal being, God is incapable of morality.”  Thus mere intuition and analysis of the infinite, since this infinite is itself passive and indifferent, may prove a subtle antidote to passion, to folly, and even to life.

I think M. Benda succeeds admirably in the purpose announced in his title of rendering his discourse coherent.  If once we accept his definitions, his corollaries follow.  Clearly and bravely he disengages his idea of infinity from other properties usually assigned to the deity, such as power, omniscience, goodness, and tutelary functions in respect to life, or to some special human society.  But coherence