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Updated: May 14, 2025
The philosophic term "person" is utterly indifferent to the ideas of limitation or illimitation. Its essential significance, its distinguishing note, is that of self-sufficiency or self-subsistence, prescinding entirely from all considerations of limits or their absence.
Prescinding from all spiritual considerations and looking at things through purely human eyes, vows of this sort must appear prejudicial to the propagation of the species. In fact, they go against the law of nature which says: increase and multiply, so we are told. If that law is natural as well as positive, it is certain that it applies to man collectively, and not individually.
If, then, we want to make the argument absolutely universal with regard to religious beliefs theism included and not presupposed and so to make it available for apologetic purposes in regard to those whose doubt is more deep-seated, we must inquire whether any basis can be found for it in non-theistic philosophy; whether, prescinding from Divine governance and from an intelligent purpose running through nature, the adaptability of a belief to the higher needs of mankind can be considered in any way to prove its truth.
Catholic theologians are even more rigid concerning the matter itself, prescinding altogether from our perception of it. They say that here no levity of matter is allowed, that is to say, every violation, however slight, of either of these two commandments, is a sin. You cannot even touch this pitch of moral defilement without being yourself defiled.
By prescinding from theism I do not mean to exclude or deny it; for it is, as I have just said, bound up with the same conception from which the "argument from adaptability" is drawn. I only mean that I do not need to build upon it as on a prior conception; that I can put it aside. Indeed, of these two off-shoots, theism is less near to the common root, as will appear later.
Again, without implying any malediction, prescinding altogether from the supernatural character of what they represent, as ejaculations only, we come across the use of such words as hell, devil, damnation, etc.
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