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Updated: June 10, 2025
Finitude is the indispensable condition of unselfishness as well as of selfishness, and of speculative vision no less than of hypothetical knowledge.
For it is architecture that paves the way, as it were, for the adequate realization of the God, toiling and wrestling in his service with external nature, and seeking to extricate it from the chaos of finitude and the abortiveness of chance.
If, going in every direction, we mark the point, if any, at which the great mass of the stars are seen behind us, the totality of all these points will lie on a surface of the general form that Herschel supposed. There is still another direct indication of the finitude of our stellar system upon which we have not touched.
The power to conceive a being more perfect than myself, can have only come from someone who is more perfect in reality than I. Since I know that the infinite contains more reality than the finite, I may conclude that the idea of the infinite has not been derived from the idea of the finite by abstraction and negation; it precedes the latter, and I become conscious of my defects and my finitude only by comparison with the absolute perfection of God.
God is Nature, if we understand by Nature not merely infinite matter and infinite thought, the two attributes of Nature specifically known to us but infinite other attributes the precise character of which we can never, because of our finitude, comprehend. Whatever is, is one. And it is, in the special Spinozistic sense, supremely perfect because absolutely real.
It is true that the Reason is compelled to accept as a final truth, many things that it cannot understand by reason of its finitude but this is not one of them. There is no logical necessity for the Reason to accept any such conception as this there is no warrant in the Reason for any such theory, idea or conclusion.
In our devotion to the universe we participate in the life of the universe; by leaning on the infinite we supplement our finitude religion makes up for the needy condition of man by bringing him into relation with the absolute, and teaching him to know and to feel himself a part of the whole.
A fuller power to represent the universe is necessarily combined with dominance over an organized troop of members; for the mind knows the universe only in so far as the universe is expressed in its body. That is what the finitude of the mind means.
The supposed "metaphysical evil" involved in finitude would then be no evil at all, but the condition of every good. In realising his own will in his own way, each creature would be perfectly happy, without yearning or pathetic regrets for other forms of being.
If the universe is the phenomenon of the divine activity, then considered as a whole it is perfect; whatever of imperfection we find in it, is merely the inevitable result of finitude.
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