358 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



of existence, so that his argument runs down into 

 the vapid truism : If perfection exists, then it 

 exists ; or (since perfection means God), if God 

 exists, then he exists. 



It is certainly the more curious — in fact, it is 

 astonishing — that the great Frenchman should have 

 tripped just here, as he was so securely in pos- 

 session of the dialectic proof of his own reality, 

 and as, more than once in his Meditations, he also 

 comes squarely upon the implication of the idea 

 of God by the idea of the self. It was criticism 

 exactly pertinent, when he pointed out that the 

 defect in Anselm's form of the argument was its 

 connecting only the idea of existence with the 

 idea of perfection, without attaining to any actual 

 existence at all, and that the argument needed sup- 

 plementing in the light of the Cartesian "criterion," 

 — the principle, namely, that a necessary connexion 

 between ideas carries with it a like connexion of 

 the corresponding tilings, so that when the exist- 

 ence of one is established, the existence of the 

 other inevitably follows. But in selecting perfec- 

 tion and existence as the connected ideas, he over- 

 looked the awkward fact, that, in the case in hand, 

 the existence of the perfect was the very point to 

 be proved. 



The argument which we have succeeded in 

 working out, on the contrary clearly avoids this 



