THE FINITENESS OF GOD. 



3^1 



is meaningless if it is not teleological {cp. ch. vll. 

 §§ 20, 21), and we cannot conceive a purpose except 

 in the intelligence of a personal being. And we 

 are prevented by the principle of not multiplying 

 entities needlessly to invent gratuitous fictions like 

 an impersonal intelligence or unconscious purpose. 



It follows (4) that God \^ finite, or rather that to 

 God, as to- all realities, infinite is an unmeaning 

 epithet. This conclusion also has already been 

 foreshadowed in many ways. Thus (a) it followed 

 from Kant's criticism of the proofs of the existence 

 of God, that only a finite God could be inferred 

 from the nature of the world {cp. ch. ii. § 19 s.f). 

 No evidence can prove an infinite cause of the 

 world, for no evidence can prove anything but 

 a cause adeqicate to the production of the world, but 

 not infinite. To infer the infinite from the finite 

 is a fallacy like infeFring the unknowable from the 

 known, and all arguments in favour of an infinite 

 God must commit it. We argue with finite minds 

 from finite data, and our conclusions must be of a 

 like nature. (b) It follows fro mi the conception of 

 God as Force {ep. ch. ix. § 21) ; for Force implies 

 resistance, and if God is to enforce His will upon the 

 world. He cannot just for that reason, be all — unless 

 indeed He is by some inexplicable chance divided 

 against Himself. And so, too (^), just because God 

 is a factor in all things, He cannot be all things. 



bution of personality asserts merely that God is the perfection of 

 the process whereby personal beings have arisen out of the lowest 

 individualities of atoms.. There is lao objection, however, to the 

 use of terms like supra-personal or ultra- personal, if we mean by 

 them something including and transcending, rather than exclud- 

 ing, personality. For doubtless the personality of God transcends 

 that of man as far as that of the highest man transcends that of 

 the atom. 



