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Updated: May 21, 2025
But the one interminable mystery, for I presume the two make but one mystery a mystery that must be a mystery to us for ever, not because God will not explain it, but because God himself could not make us understand it is first, how he can be self-existent, and next, how he can make other beings exist: self-existence and creation no man will ever understand.
After he had spent forty years there as a shepherd, God appeared to him, and then first revealed Himself as JEHOVAH, the Name proclaiming His eternal self-existence, I AM THAT I AM, a Name so holy, that the translators of our Bible have abstained from repeating it where it occurs, but have put the Name, the LORD, in capital letters in its stead.
And as for the self-existence of substance, it is very true that a substance may be conceived to exist without any other substance, but so also may an attribute without any other attribute: and we can no more imagine a substance without attributes than we can imagine attributes without a substance.
We have, therefore, but to apply the postulate of self-existence to this single ultimate datum, and we have a theory of things as rational as the Atheism of the last century was irrational.
Nevertheless, that this theory is more akin to the Atheism of the last century than to any other theory of that time, is, I think, unquestionable; for while we retain the central doctrine of self-existence as alone a scientifically admissible, or non-gratuitous, explanation of things, we only change the original theory by transferring the application of this doctrine from the world of manifestations to that which causes the manifestations: we do not resort to any of the additional doctrines whereby the other theories of the universe were distinguished from the theory of Atheism in its original form.
The extension of the analogy cannot prove either that law and order are not manifestations of design, or that there may be design without a personal designer; all that it could prove, even were it legitimate, would be the existence of an organized instead of a spiritual Being, which, on the supposition of its self-existence, a supposition which is not excluded by the argument, since that majestic attribute, which may be fairly held to "include all others," is expressly admitted, neither requires nor admits of an infinite series of contrivers.
Thus, while he despises the atheists of the eighteenth century for their irrationality in believing in the self-existence of a phenomenal universe, and reviles them for their irreligion in denying that "the religious sentiment needed satisfaction;" he does not wait to inquire whether, in its essential substance, the theory of these men is not the one that has proved itself best able to withstand the grinding action of more recent thought.
But when he turns from his perceiving and thinking to his willing self he becomes for the first time aware of something deeper than the mere objective presentations of consciousness; he obtains a direct intuition of an originant, causative, and independent self-existence. He will have attained in short to the knowledge of a noumenon, and of the only knowable noumenon.
If we take independence in the sense of unlimitedness and aseity, we can speak, as the example of Spinoza shows, of only one, the divine substance. If the Spinozistic result is to be avoided, we must substitute independent action for independent existence, self-activity for self-existence.
All persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision, there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.
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