Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VIII. COGNITION OF GOD. The knowledge of the existence and character of God has formed a living question in all ages, and has aroused and engaged the energies of the greatest minds more deeply and fully perhaps than any other. This is accounted for by the speculative interest and practical importance of the subject and by atheistic teaching. In the defense of the existence of God and the truthfulness of our knowledge of him, diverse modes of reasoning and arguments have been employed, which have variously had ascendency in successive periods, and also have prevailed simultaneously with different classes of thinkers. The chief of these arguments are the so-called Ontological, Moral, Cosmological, and Teleological. Different forms of the Ontological Argument were developed by Anselm and Des Cartes. Anselm, in brief, taught that it must be granted that the human mind possesses the idea of the most perfect Being conceivable. Now the most perfect Being conceivable is one who, besides subjective existence in our thought, has existence external to us, to which the subjective thought corresponds. A being of only possible objective existence is one far inferior to the most perfect Being; consequently our idea of God, being the idea of the most perfect Being, necessarily implies the objective reality of God. In thus necessarily implying the existence of a corresponding objective reality, the idea of God differs from all other ideas. Des Cartes argued that our idea of God implies an objective reality, first, because it is a clear and distinct idea; but, more certainly, because it is the idea of an infinite Being. Man, a finite being, can not of himself imagine an infinite being, because no finite being can imagine a much more perfect being than itself, or th...
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
