On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient...

For we find even the excellent Descartes, who gave the first impulse to subjective reflection and thereby became the father of modern philosophy, still entangled in confusions for which it is difficult to account; and we shall soon see to what serious and deplorable consequences these confusions have led with regard to Metaphysics. In the "Responsio ad secundas objectiones in meditationes de prima philosophia," axioma i. he says: Nulla res existit, de qua non possit quæri, quænam sit causa, cur existat. Hoc enim de ipso Deo quæri potest, non quod indigeat ulla causa ut existat, sed quia ipsa ejus naturæ immensitas est CAUSA, SIVE RATIO, propter quam nulla causa indiget ad existendum. He ought to have said: The immensity of God is a logical reason from which it follows, that God needs no cause; whereas he confounds the two together and obviously has no clear consciousness of the difference between reason and cause. Properly speaking however, it is his intention which mars his insight. For here, where the law of causality demands a cause, he substitutes a reason instead of it, because the latter, unlike the former, does not immediately lead to something beyond it; and thus, by means of this very axiom, he clears the way to the Ontological Proof of the existence of God, which was really his invention, for Anselm had only indicated it in a general manner.

Immediately after these axioms, of which I have just quoted the first, there comes a formal, quite serious statement of the Ontological Proof, which, in fact, already lies within that axiom, as the chicken does within the egg that has been long brooded over. Thus, while everything else stands in need of a cause for its existence, the immensitas implied in the conception of the Deity—who is introduced to us upon the ladder of the Cosmological Proof—suffices in lieu of a cause or, as the proof itself expresses it: in conceptu entis summe perfecti existentia necessaria continetur. This, then, is the sleight-of-hand trick, for the sake of which the confusion, familiar even to Aristotle, of the two principal meanings of the principle of sufficient reason, has been used directly in majorem Dei gloriam.

Considered by daylight, however, and without prejudice, this famous Ontological Proof is really a charming joke. On some occasion or other, some one excogitates a conception, composed out of all sorts of predicates, among which however he takes care to include the predicate actuality or existence, either openly stated or wrapped up for decency's sake in some other predicate, such as perfectio, immensitas, or something of the kind. Now, it is well known,—that, from a given conception, those predicates which are essential to it—i.e., without which it cannot be thought—and likewise the predicates which are essential to those predicates themselves, may be extracted by means of purely logical analyses, and consequently have logical truth: that is, they have their reason of knowledge in the given conception. Accordingly the predicate reality or existence is now extracted from this arbitrarily thought conception, and an object corresponding to it is forthwith presumed to have real existence independently of the conception.

After all, the simplest answer to such ontological demonstrations is: "All depends upon the source whence you have derived your conception: if it be taken from experience, all well and good, for in this case its object exists and needs no further proof; if, on the contrary, it has been hatched in your own sinciput, all its predicates are of no avail, for it is a mere phantasm." But we form an unfavourable prejudice against the pretensions of a theology which needed to have recourse to such proofs as this in order to gain a footing on the territory of philosophy, to which it is quite foreign, but on which it longs to trespass. But oh! for the prophetic wisdom of Aristotle! He had never even heard of the Ontological Proof; yet as though he could detect this piece of scholastic jugglery through the shades of coming darkness and were anxious to bar the road to it, he carefully shows[27] that defining a thing and proving its existence are two different matters, separate to all eternity; since by the one we learn what it is that is meant, and by the other that such a thing exists. Like an oracle of the future, he pronounces the sentence: τὸ δ' εἶναι οὐκ οὐσία οὐδενί· οὐ γὰρ γένος τὸ ὄν: (ESSE autem nullius rei essentia, est, quandoquidem ens non est genus) which means: "Existence never can belong to the essence of a thing." On the other hand, we may see how great was Herr von Schelling's veneration for the Ontological Proof in a long note, p. 152, of the 1st vol. of his "Philosophische Schriften" of 1809.

We may even see in it something still more instructive, i.e., how easily Germans allow sand to be thrown in their eyes by impudence and blustering swagger. But for so thoroughly pitiable a creature as Hegel, whose whole pseudo-philosophy is but a monstrous amplification of the Ontological Proof, to have undertaken its defence against Kant, is indeed an alliance of which the Ontological Proof itself might be ashamed, however little it may in general be given to blushing. How can I be expected to speak with deference of men, who have brought philosophy into contempt?