HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 357 



by the pure spontaneity of each intelligence) 

 between the idea of each mind and the idea of 

 God, while leading to nothing if it stands by itself, 

 leads inevitably to the reality of God as soon as 

 the reality of any single mind is assured. 



Now, the reality of each individual mind it is 

 impossible to question, as Descartes has sufficiently 

 shown ; for every effort to question it presupposes 

 its truth. Though I were to keep on saying for- 

 ever that I doubted my own existence, yet every 

 time I said it I must be a thinking life to make 

 the statement possible. Underneath every doubt 

 of thinking there lies, as a positive fact, the think- 

 ing that floats the doubt : so the more persistent 

 the doubting, the stronger the proof of a real self- 

 consciousness. The inevitable connexion between 

 the idea of any single consciousness and the idea 

 of God being given, this dialectically demonstrable 

 existence of the self brings with it the actual 

 existence of God. Here we have the real analogue 

 of Descartes's famous illustration of his form of 

 the argument by the necessary connexion between 

 the idea of a mountain and the idea of a valley : 

 if the mountain is shown actually to exist, it fol- 

 lows resistlessly that the valley exists too. Des- 

 cartes, however, instead of connecting the idea of 

 God with the idea of the self, made the slip of 

 connecting the idea of perfection with the idea 



