From the self-existing substance it is a short step to the existence of God.  After a few more propositions following one another with the same kind of coherence, we arrive successively at the conclusions that there is but one substance, that this substance being necessarily existent, it is also infinite, and that it is therefore identical with the Being who had been previously defined as the “Ens absolute perfectum,” consisting of infinite “attributes, each of which expresses His eternal and infinite essence.”  Demonstrations of this kind were the characteristics of the period.  Des Cartes had set the example of constructing them, and was followed by Cudworth, Clerke, Berkeley, and many others besides Spinoza.  The inconclusiveness of their reasoning may perhaps be observed most readily in the strangely opposite conceptions formed by all these writers of the nature of that Being whose existence they nevertheless agreed, by the same method, to gather each out of their ideas.  It is important, however, to examine it carefully, for it is the very key-stone of the Pantheistic system.  As stated by Des Cartes, the argument stands something as follows:—­God is an all-perfect Being,—­perfection is the idea which we form of him:  existence is a mode of perfection, and therefore God exists.  The sophism we are told is only apparent; existence is part of the idea; it is as much involved in it, as the equality of all lines drawn from the centre to the circumference of a circle is involved in the idea of a circle, and a non-existent all-perfect Being is as inconceivable as a quadrilateral triangle.  It is sometimes answered that in this way we may prove the existence of anything, —­Titans, Chimaeras, or the Olympian Gods; we have but to define them as existing, and the proof is complete.  But in this objection there is really 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,”