Pee) 
1907-8.] SPACE AND Its DIMENSIONS. 317 
establish the difference between ‘‘Realitéat’’ and ‘‘Wirklichkeit.” If 
people say my imagination of an angel ora dragon has no reality, the 
dragon does not exist, but the love for my country is real, exists, they 
employ, though without being fully aware of it, two different concep- 
tions of reality or existence. Philosophers and theologians of all ages 
have made frantic efforts to prove the existence of God, because they 
failed to see that to attribute existence to God means to lower the Divine 
Being to the level of Hiscreatures. If existenceis taken in the first of the 
above stated meanings, God may exist as a phantasm, a product of our 
imagination. If on the other hand we apply the second meaning, God is 
nothing but an object in space or space itself (Malbranche). In either 
sense it is blasphemy to attribute existence to the Divine Being. The 
Divine Being, we believe, is that through which everything has ‘‘exis- 
tence,’ consequently existence cannot be attributed to Himself. Existence 
is too low a term to be predicated of the Divine Being, except we attri- 
bute it only to Him and to nothing else (Spinoza). The playing with 
the ambiguous words, reality and existence, is toa large extent responsible 
for the discord of the philosophical systems which has brought metaphysics 
into such discredit. Existence and reality are spoken of as if they meant 
something about which everybody was perfectly clear and which did 
not need definition; but only those expressions which designate 
absolutely simple elements which cannot be further analyzed, need no 
definition, or if they needed it, could not haveit. Such conceptions of 
ultimate élements are never ambiguous. Consequently, he who uses the 
term existence, or reality, must either show that these words designate 
simple unanalyzable facts, or he must give an unambiguous definition. 
But neither of these has ever been satisfactorily done. But more than 
that, I claim that the terms existence and reality have only become so 
prominent through human lying. The facts can never be unreal or 
non-existent. Nothing is unreal or non-existent except the products of 
wilful human negation, consequently the distinction of real and 
unreal, existing and not existing would not be necessary if men in their 
statements to themselves and others would keep to thefacts. Philosophy 
has for thousands of years attacked the problem from the wrong end. 
It has always been hunting for a greater ‘‘more real’’ reality behind the 
given one, of which it was falsely alleged that it was deceiving. The given 
facts never deceive, but our untruthful interpretation of facts does so. 
Philosophy should not ask: Is there anything ‘‘real’”’? and what is it? 
But it should inquire: Is there anything ‘‘unreal,”’ and what is it? 
Truth and untruth are subjective, there is no such thing as an objective 
untruth, an error of nature or a contradiction of facts. All error, illusion 
and deception lie not in the facts but in the interpretation, consequently 
