356 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



thus, as the universally implicated Ideal, the rational 

 Ground of all other possible self-definition, and "eter- 

 nal creation " is a fact : all is real through Final 

 Cause. The created, as well as the Creator, creates. 

 Self-activity that recognises and affirms self-activ- 

 ity in others, freedom that freely recognises free- 

 dom, is universal : every part of this eternally real 

 world is instinct with life in itself. Each lives in 

 and by free ideality, the active contemplation of 

 its own ideal ; and this ideal embraces, as its 

 essential, prime, and final factor, the one Supreme 

 Ideal. 



Here it is worth while to digress once more, to 

 take an exact account of the nature of this proof 

 for the existence of God. Those of you at home 

 in the history of philosophy will hardly fail to 

 notice that it is simply what the ontological argu- 

 ment of Plato, Augustine, Anselm, and Descartes 

 becomes when taken in the light of the system of 

 coexistent free minds — the argument so seriously 

 impugned by Kant, and so vainly striving after 

 rehabilitation in the monism of Hegel and his 

 school. For it is the proof of God directly from 

 the idea of God as the freely posited implicate 

 without which no self-active or individual mind 

 can define itself and posit itself as real. But this 

 logically necessary connexion {i.e. connexion put 



