(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 before us is one which can never be determined.  The truth which is to be proved is one which we already believe; and if, as we believe also, our conviction of God’s existence is, like that of our own existence, intuitive and immediate, the grounds of it can never adequately be analysed; we cannot say exactly what they are, and therefore we cannot say what they are not; whatever we receive intuitively, we receive without proof; and stated as a naked proposition, it must involve necessarily a petitio principii.  We have a right, however, to object at once to an argument in which the conclusion is more obvious than the premises; and if it lead on to other consequences which we disapprove in themselves, we reject it without difficulty or hesitation.  We ourselves believe that God is, because we experience the control of a “power” which is stronger than we; and our instincts teach us so much of the nature of that power as our own relation to it requires us to know.  God is the being to whom our obedience is due; and the perfections which we attribute to Him are those moral perfections which are the proper object of our reverence.  Strange to say, the perfections of Spinoza, which appear so clear to him, are without any moral character whatever; and for men to speak of the justice of God, he tells us, is but to see in Him a reflection of themselves:  as if a triangle were to conceive of Him as eminenter triangularis, or a circle to give Him the property of circularity.